By Claude McKay
Claude McKay (1889–1948) was once probably the most prolific and complicated African American writers of the early 20th century. A Jamaican-born writer of poetry, brief tales, novels, and nonfiction, McKay has frequently been linked to the “New Negro” or Harlem Renaissance, a circulation of African American paintings, tradition, and intellectualism among global battle I and the nice melancholy. yet his dating to the move was once advanced. actually absent from Harlem in the course of that interval, he committed such a lot of his time to touring via Europe, Russia, and Africa in the course of the Nineteen Twenties and Thirties. His energetic participation in Communist teams and the novel Left additionally inspired convinced evaluations on race and sophistication that strained his dating to the Harlem Renaissance and its black intelligentsia. In his 1937 autobiography, A good way from Home, McKay explains what it capacity to be a black “rebel sojourner” and provides one of many first unflattering, but informative, exposés of the Harlem Renaissance. Reprinted right here with a serious advent by means of Gene Andrew Jarrett, this booklet will problem readers to reconsider McKay’s articulation of id, artwork, race, and politics and situate those issues when it comes to his oeuvre and his literary contemporaries among the realm wars.
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