Home to Harlem
Claude McKay
Home to Harlem
The first bestseller by a Black American novelist — written in France, set in Harlem, and denounced by the movement it belonged to.
Read our takeHarlem Shadows
Claude McKay
Harlem Shadows
by Claude McKay
The collection that opened the Harlem Renaissance, written in strict sonnets by a Jamaican who refused to soften either the form or the anger.
- 1922
About Claude McKay
The story, briefly
Spoiler-freeHarlem Shadows gathers the poems that made Claude McKay's American reputation, among them 'If We Must Die', 'America', 'The Harlem Dancer' and 'The Tropics in New York'. The book is usually treated as the opening of the Harlem Renaissance. What makes it strange, and still argued over, is the mismatch between what the poems say and how they are built: McKay wrote about lynching, exile, sexual longing and racial fury inside tightly rhymed sonnets and traditional stanzas, using the most conservative machinery available to English verse to say things English verse had not been saying.
What is in the book
The collection runs to roughly ninety short poems and moves between three registers. There are the protest poems, of which 'If We Must Die' — written in response to the racial violence of the summer of 1919 — is the most famous. There are the exile poems, in which a Jamaican in New York keeps seeing the Caribbean through the American city: fruit on a stall in Harlem returns him to the tropics and undoes him. And there are the Harlem poems proper, watching dancers, prostitutes, workers and street life with a gaze that is neither sentimental nor superior.
The formal choice is the argument. McKay had been raised on English poetry in colonial Jamaica and he kept the sonnet, the quatrain and the regular rhyme when almost every modernist around him was abandoning them. Critics have read this variously as conservatism, as a claim on a tradition that excluded him, and as a deliberate tension — the containing form making the fury inside it more, not less, audible.
Several of the poems had appeared earlier in magazines and in the 1920 London collection Spring in New Hampshire, some in revised form. Harlem Shadows is where they were assembled for an American readership and where they landed.
Why we recommend it
The book the Harlem Renaissance is usually dated from
If you read one collection to understand what the movement sounded like at its start, this is it.
Formal control against furious content
The sonnets are the point. McKay put the rage inside the most orderly structure English verse offers, and the friction is what the poems run on.
A Caribbean writer's New York
The exile poems see Harlem through Jamaica. It is a double vision no American-born contemporary could have written.
What this book explores
The real history
'If We Must Die' came out of the racial violence across American cities in the summer of 1919, and was later quoted in contexts McKay never anticipated — including, reportedly, in wartime Britain.
Timeline
1919
'If We Must Die' is written and published amid the racial violence of that summer.
1920
Spring in New Hampshire appears in London; several poems are later revised for Harlem Shadows.
1922
Harcourt, Brace publishes Harlem Shadows in New York.
1922
McKay leaves for the Soviet Union, and does not live in the United States again for over a decade.
Book editions
Hardcover
- Hardcover
- Harcourt, Brace and Company
- 1922
Paperback
- Paperback
- University of Illinois Press
- 2004
Reader reviews
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A Long Way from Home
Claude McKay
A Long Way from Home
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.
Read our takeHarlem Shadows: frequently asked questions
Why is Harlem Shadows important?
It is generally treated as the book that opens the Harlem Renaissance, and it established Claude McKay as the movement's first major poetic voice.
Why did Claude McKay write in sonnets?
He was educated on English verse in colonial Jamaica and kept its forms deliberately. The effect is a deliberate tension — protest content held inside the most orderly structure the tradition offers.
What is 'If We Must Die' about?
It answers the racial violence of 1919 with a call to resist rather than die passively. It is a sonnet, and it never names a race, which is part of why it travelled so far beyond its occasion.
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