Jamaican-born poet and novelist, and one of the essential writers of the Harlem Renaissance. He arrived in Paris from Moscow in 1923 and stayed in France until 1928, writing Home to Harlem there — and forming a low opinion of the rich, white expatriate scene that dominates most accounts of the period. His Paris is the same years as Hemingway's and almost nothing like it.
Claude McKay was a Jamaican-American poet and novelist, one of the first major writers of the Harlem Renaissance. He was born in Sunny Ville, Jamaica, on 15 September 1889 and died in Chicago on 22 May 1948.
His poem If We Must Die, written in 1919 after a summer of white mob attacks on Black communities across the United States, is the work he is best known for.[1] It is a sonnet — a strict European form — that tells Black Americans to fight back rather than die like hunted animals.
His novel Home to Harlem, published in 1928, was the first bestseller by a Black American novelist. Some of the older Black establishment attacked it for showing Harlem's cabarets, gambling and sex rather than respectable Black life.
He spent twelve years abroad, in Britain, the Soviet Union, France, Spain and Morocco, and wrote most of his fiction outside the United States. His second novel, Banjo, set among Black seamen on the Marseille docks, became one of the founding texts for the Francophone Négritude writers.
Festus Claudius McKay was born on 15 September 1889 in Sunny Ville, in the hills of Clarendon Parish, Jamaica, the youngest of eleven children of prosperous peasant farmers.
His father, Thomas, had been born to Ashanti parents and told his children about their African descent. His family had land, which put them above most of their neighbours.
Two people taught him. One was an older brother, a schoolteacher, who directed his reading. The other was Walter Jekyll, an English folklorist living in Jamaica, who took an interest in him. Jekyll told him to write in Jamaican Creole rather than in imitation English. McKay did, and in 1912 he published two books of verse in it, Songs of Jamaica and Constab Ballads, the second drawn from a period he spent in the Jamaican constabulary.
Those two books make him the first poet to publish seriously in Jamaican Creole, and they won him a prize that paid his passage to America.
McKay reached the United States in 1912, at twenty-two, to study agriculture at the Tuskegee Institute in Alabama. He hated the regimentation there, left within months for Kansas State University, and abandoned formal study altogether in 1914 for New York.
The shock was the racism. Jamaica had a Black majority and a colour hierarchy; the American South had lynching and segregation laws. He wrote afterwards that the discovery changed everything he did.
In New York he worked as a porter, a barman and a dining-car waiter on the railways, and he wrote. His poems began appearing in magazines from 1917.
In the summer of 1919, white mobs attacked Black communities in Chicago, Washington, Elaine in Arkansas and more than twenty other places. Hundreds of Black Americans were killed. It became known as the Red Summer.
McKay wrote If We Must Die in response and published it in July 1919. It is a Shakespearean sonnet, and it says that if Black people are to be killed, they should die fighting, facing the mob, and not penned like hogs. It never names race.
The poem was reprinted everywhere. It has been read into the Congressional Record, quoted during the Second World War, and read aloud by prisoners during the Attica uprising of 1971. McKay wrote for another thirty years and nothing he did displaced it.
McKay was a communist for a period, worked on the socialist magazine The Liberator as an editor, and in 1922 travelled to the Soviet Union for the Fourth Congress of the Communist International.
He was received as a celebrity. He addressed the Congress on the position of Black workers, was carried through Moscow streets, met Trotsky, and wrote a book about race and communism that appeared in Russian before it appeared in En[2]glish.
He left Russia in May 1923 and came west. He was in Paris from late August 1923, fell seriously ill with influenza in December, and stayed on in France, on and off, until 1928. Those are the exact years of the standard Lost Generation story, and his account does not match it. McKay liked the cosmopolitanism of the city and had little patience with the expatriate circles themselves, which were largely rich and largely white. He is not in the memoirs of that Paris because he was not trying to be.
He then spent a decade in Europe and North Africa: France, where he lived in Paris and Marseille; Spain; and Morocco, where he settled in Tangier. He was ill, often broke, and worked as a model and a valet between books.
The writing went badly before it went well. He worked in France on a novel called Color Scheme, could not place it with a publisher, and destroyed the only manuscript.
Home to Harlem, published in 1928, follows Jake, a Black soldier who deserts the segregated American army in France and comes home to Harlem, and Ray, a Haitian intellectual working on the railways.
It sold better than any novel by a Black American writer had before, and it was attacked hard from inside Black America. W. E. B. Du Bois wrote that after reading it he felt like taking a bath, objecting that McKay had given white readers the drinking, dancing and sex they wanted to see.
The disagreement was a real argument about strategy: whether Black writers should present respectable images to persuade white America, or write what they saw. McKay's answer was the second, and the younger Harlem writers, including Langston Hughes and Zora Neale Hurston, took his side.
Banjo, published in 1929, is set on the Marseille waterfront among Black seamen, dockers and drifters from America, the Caribbean and West Africa. It has almost no plot; it is a book of talk, music and argument among men living on the edge of a European port.
Banjo mattered most to writers in France. The students from Martinique, French Guiana and Senegal who founded the Négritude movement — Aimé Césaire, Léon-Gontran Damas and Léopold Sédar Senghor — read Banjo and Home to Harlem and found in them a Black writing that did not apologise. Senghor later called McKay the true inventor of Négritude.
Banana Bottom, his third novel, published in 1933, returns to Jamaica and is generally considered his best. It sold almost nothing.
McKay came back to the United States in 1934, at the depth of the Depression, and could not make a living. He took relief work, then wrote for the Federal Writers' Project, and published an autobiography, A Long Way from Home, in 1937 and a study of Harlem in 1940.
He broke with communism, and by the 1940s was writing against it. In 1944 he was baptised a Catholic and worked for the Catholic Youth Organization in Chicago, a change that surprised almost everyone who knew him.
His health had been poor for years. He died of a heart attack in Chicago on 22 May 1948, aged fifty-eight.
In 2009 a graduate student, Jean-Christophe Cloutier, working through the papers of the publisher Samuel Roth at Columbia University, found the complete typescript of an unknown McKay novel.
Amiable with Big Teeth is a satire about Harlem's response to Italy's invasion of Ethiopia in 1935, written in about 1941 and never published. Its authorship was authenticated and it appeared in 2017, sixty-nine years after McKay's death.
A second unpublished novel, Romance in Marseille, written around 1933 and dealing with a disabled West African dockworker and with sexuality more openly than anything McKay published in his lifetime, was issued in 2020.
Claude McKay published across four decades and three continents, in two languages, and a substantial part of his work reached print only after his death. The list below covers the book-length primary bibliography: original books, works first published in translation, posthumously recovered manuscripts, correspondence, and the principal collected editions. It does not treat every modern reprint or standalone printing of an individual poem as a separate work.
Original and authorial works
Principal selected and collected editions. These are significant publications, but they gather work published earlier rather than constituting new writing.
Chronological List
McKay published before the Harlem Renaissance had a name. He was writing serious poetry about Black life by 1917, and If We Must Die gave the period its first widely known poem. He wrote it as a sonnet, using the most formal European verse form available to make a case for Black resistance.
His novels showed that books about ordinary Black life could find a large audience. Home to Harlem sold better than any novel by a Black American writer before it, and the argument it caused with Du Bois set the terms for decades of debate about what Black writers owe their readers. Banjo did something he never planned: it reached students from Martinique, French Guiana and Senegal in Paris, and the Négritude movement they built out of it changed African and Caribbean writing in French.
Born Festus Claudius McKay on 15 September at Sunny Ville in Clarendon Parish, Jamaica, the youngest of eleven children of prosperous peasant farmers.
Is sent to live with an older brother, a schoolteacher, who directs his reading.
Meets Walter Jekyll, an English folklorist, who encourages him to write in Jamaican Creole rather than in imitation English.
Serves briefly in the Jamaican constabulary, an experience that produces Constab Ballads.
Publishes Songs of Jamaica and Constab Ballads, the first serious poetry published in Jamaican Creole, and wins a prize that pays his passage to America.
Arrives in the United States at twenty-two to study agriculture at the Tuskegee Institute in Alabama, and leaves within months.
Studies at Kansas State University.
Abandons formal study and moves to New York, working as a porter, barman and dining-car waiter.
Begins publishing poems in American magazines.
Publishes If We Must Die in July, after white mobs attack Black communities in more than twenty American cities during the Red Summer.
Travels to London, works on a socialist paper and publishes the collection Spring in New Hampshire.
Returns to New York and becomes an editor of the socialist magazine The Liberator.
Publishes Harlem Shadows, the collection that establishes him as a leading voice of the emerging Harlem Renaissance.
Travels to the Soviet Union for the Fourth Congress of the Communist International, addresses it on the position of Black workers, and meets Trotsky.
Publishes The Negroes in America, on race and communism, in Russian, years before it appears in English.
Settles in France, beginning twelve years abroad.
Publishes Home to Harlem, the first bestseller by a Black American novelist. W. E. B. Du Bois attacks it publicly.
Publishes Banjo, set among Black seamen on the Marseille waterfront.
Moves to Tangier in Morocco, where he lives for several years.
Publishes the story collection Gingertown.
Publishes Banana Bottom, set in Jamaica and generally considered his best novel. It sells almost nothing.
Returns to the United States at the depth of the Depression and cannot make a living. He spends a period in a work camp.
Works for the Federal Writers' Project in New York.
Publishes his autobiography, A Long Way from Home.
Publishes Harlem: Negro Metropolis, a study of the district. Becomes an American citizen.
Writes Amiable with Big Teeth, a satire on Harlem's response to Italy's invasion of Ethiopia, which is never published in his lifetime.
Is baptised a Catholic and moves to Chicago to work for the Catholic Youth Organization.
Dies of a heart attack in Chicago on 22 May, aged fifty-eight.
Selected Poems is published after his death.
Léopold Sédar Senghor and other Négritude writers credit Banjo and Home to Harlem as founding influences on the movement.
A graduate student finds the complete typescript of Amiable with Big Teeth in a publisher's papers at Columbia University.
Amiable with Big Teeth is published, sixty-nine years after McKay's death.
Romance in Marseille, written around 1933 and unpublished in his lifetime, is issued.
Cultural movement · c. 1918 – mid-1930s
McKay is one of the defining writers of the Harlem Renaissance, best known for the sonnet If We Must Die and the 1922 collection Harlem Shadows. He wrote Home to Harlem in France between 1923 and 1928.
The collection that opened the Harlem Renaissance, written in strict sonnets by a Jamaican who refused to soften either the form or the anger.
The first bestseller by a Black American novelist — written in France, set in Harlem, and denounced by the movement it belonged to.
Black seamen, drifters and musicians on the Marseille waterfront — the novel that gave Négritude its vocabulary, written by a Jamaican who preferred the docks to literary Paris.
A Jamaican woman educated in England comes home and declines to be improved — the novel Claude McKay wrote furthest from Harlem and rated highest himself.
Claude McKay's account of two decades of travel — Harlem, London, Moscow, Berlin, Paris, Marseille, Morocco — by a writer who refused to settle anywhere or belong to anyone's programme.
Written around 1930, unpublished for ninety years: a novel of the Marseille docks with a disabled Black protagonist and openly queer characters, decades ahead of anything that could be printed.
A Jamaican-American poet and novelist, born in Jamaica in 1889 and died in Chicago in 1948. He was one of the first major writers of the Harlem Renaissance, and wrote the poem If We Must Die and the novel Home to Harlem.
Written in July 1919, after white mobs attacked Black communities in more than twenty American cities that summer, it argues that if Black people are to be killed they should die fighting rather than penned like hogs. It is a Shakespearean sonnet and it never names race, which is part of why it has been quoted by so many different groups since.
It showed Harlem's cabarets, gambling and sex rather than respectable Black life, and W. E. B. Du Bois wrote that reading it made him feel like taking a bath. The argument was about strategy: whether Black writers should present respectable images to persuade white readers, or write what they saw.
He lived in France for several years from 1923, in Paris and Marseille, and set his novel Banjo on the Marseille waterfront. Banjo and Home to Harlem were read by the Martinican and Senegalese students in Paris who founded the Négritude movement, and Léopold Sédar Senghor later called McKay its true inventor.
Yes. His first two books, Songs of Jamaica and Constab Ballads, both published in 1912, are in Jamaican Creole, and they make him the first poet to publish seriously in the language. An English folklorist, Walter Jekyll, had persuaded him to write in it rather than in imitation English.
Several. A graduate student found the complete typescript of Amiable with Big Teeth in a publisher's papers at Columbia University in 2009, and it was published in 2017. Romance in Marseille, written around 1933, appeared in 2020.
Associated with
McKay is one of the defining writers of the Harlem Renaissance, best known for the sonnet If We Must Die and the 1922 collection Harlem Shadows. He wrote Home to Harlem in France between 1923 and 1928.
The sources below include biographies, scholarly essays, interviews, and primary materials that informed this page. They reflect both the historical record and ongoing critical conversations about Claude McKay and their work.
Reference entry used for the birth and death dates, Home to Harlem and the three novels.
Reference article cross-checked for the Jamaican childhood, the Soviet journey, the years abroad and the posthumous publications.
Web source consulted for documented facts and historical context presented on the Claude McKay page.
Contemporary reporting or criticism used to document the historical reception and context of Claude McKay.
Seton Hall's account of the documentary Claude McKay: From Harlem to Marseille, used for his years in France from 1923 to 1928 and the route through Jamaica, Russia and Morocco that the film traces.
Archival evidence used to document the historical record connected to Claude McKay.
These references anchor the page in the documented record and in the scholarly conversations around Claude McKay. Every claim on this page traces back to one or more of the works listed here.
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