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Claude McKay (1889-1948)

LINKS

http://www.poets.org/poets/poets.cfm?prmID=26

This link connects you to the Academy of American Poets. Here you will find an exhibit on Claude McKay including a biography, online primary texts, criticism, bibliographic information, and additional links.

http://www.english.uiuc.edu/maps/poets/m_r/mckay/mckay.htm

This link connects you to the Modern American Poetry site, edited by Professor Cary Nelson at the University of Illinois, Urbana. Here you will find an exhibit of secondary criticism, bibliographic information, and external links on Claude McKay.

BIOGRAPHY

Born into a Jamaican farm family, Festus Claudius McKay received an education at first from his oldest brother, a schoolteacher. McKay began to write poetry as early as age ten before he entered into an apprenticeship to a cabinetmaker. At 18, he was encouraged to write dialect poetry by an expatriate English gentleman living in Jamaica, Walter Jekyll, who later set McKay's verse to music. When he immigrated to the United States in 1912, McKay had already published two volumes of dialect verse that drew on native folklore motifs, Songs of Jamaica (1912) and Constab Ballads (1912). Upon his arrival in America, McKay studied briefly at Tuskegee Institute before leaving for Kansas State College. By 1914, he had moved to New York through Jekyll's patronage where he was briefly married to Eulalie Imelda Lewars. In 1917 he published "Invocation" and "The Harlem Dancer" that drew the attention of Max Eastman, the editor of the socialist magazine The Liberator. Through his collaboration with Eastman, McKay came to edit The Liberator and emerged as a leading voice in the Harlem Renaissance and in 1919 published several protest poems that showed a mastery of the sonnet form including "If We Must Die," "Baptism," "The White House," and "The Lynching." During the next three years, McKay lived in England where he worked for the Workers' Drednought, a British socialist magazine. 1922 marked the publication of two volumes of verse, Spring in New Hampshire and, more importantly, Harlem Shadows. For the following twelve years, McKay traveled in Europe, the Soviet Union, and Africa during which time he published Home to Harlem (1928), his first widely read novel, followed by Banjo: A Story without a Plot (1929), Gingertown (1932), and Banana Bottom (1933). Meanwhile, living in France, he became a major influence on Léopold Sédar Senghor, Aimé Cesaire, and other in the Negritude movement of French West Africa and the West Indies. Returning to the United States in 1934, McKay worked for the Federal Writers Project in 1936, finishing A Long Way from Home, his autobiography. Four years later, he became a citizen of the United States and later converted to Catholicism, working for the Chicago-based Catholic Youth Organization. After suffering for several years from chronic coronary disease, McKay died of congestive heart failure in 1948. Remembered not just as one of the seminal voices of the Harlem Renaissance, McKay's masterful fusion of the sonnet tradition with the rhetoric of social commitment remains an important example for a subsequent generation of formalist writers including Gwendolyn Brooks and for later poets of the Black Aesthetic Movement.

SECONDARY SOURCES

Cooper, Wayne F. Claude McKay: Rebel Sojourner in the Harlem Renaissance: A Biography. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1987.

Gayle, Addison. Claude McKay: The Black Poet at War. Detroit: Broadside Press, 1972.

Giles, James Richard. Claude McKay. Boston: Twayne Publishers, 1976.

Hathaway, Heather. Caribbean Waves: Relocating Claude McKay and Paule Marshall. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1999.

James, Winston. A Fierce Hatred of Injustice: Claude McKay's Jamaica and His Poetry of Rebellion. New York: Verso, 2000.

McKay, Claude. A Long Way from Home. (1937). New York: Arno Press, 1969.

Tillery, Tyrone. Claude McKay: A Black Poet's Struggle for Identity. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1992.

SECONDARY SOURCES BY CHAPTER