"Claude Mckay"(September 15,1889-May 22 19480

Was a Jamaican-American writer and poet.He was seminal figure in the Harlem Renaissance and wrote three novels: Home to Harlem.(1928),a best seller which won the Harmon Gold Award for Literature,Banjo (1929),and Banana Bottom (1933).Claude also authored a collection of short stories,Gingertown.(1932),and two autobiographical books,A Long Way From Home (1937) and Harlem:Negro Metropolis (1940).His book of poetry,Harlem Shadows (1922) was among the first books published during the Harlem Renaissance.Claude books of collected poems,Selected Poems(1953),was published posthumously.He was attracted to communism in his early life,but was a never a member of the Communist Party.He was born Festus Claudius McKay Nairne Castle near James Hill,Clarendon,Jamaica.He was the youngest child of Thomas Francis McKay and Hannah Ann Elizabeth Edwards,well-to-do peasant farmers who had enough property to qualify to vote.His father was of Ashanti descent,and Claude recounted that his father would share stories of Ashanti customs with him.His mother was of Malagasy ancestry.At four years old,Claude started basic school at the church he attended.At age seven,he was sent to live with his oldest brother,a school teacher,to be given the best education available. While living with his brother,Uriah Theodore,Claude became an avid reader of classical and British literature,as well as philosophy,science and theology.He started poetry at the age of 10.In 1906 ,Claude became an apprentice to a carriage and cabinet maker known as Old Brenga.He stayed in his apprenticeship for about two years.During that time,in 1907,Claude met a man name Walter Jekyll who became a mentor and an inspiration for him.He encouraged Claude to concentrate on his writing.Walter convinced Claude to write in his native dialect and even later set some of Claude verses to music.Walter helped him publish his firs book of poems,Songs of Jamaica,in 1912.These were the first poems published in Jamaica Patois (dialect of mainly English words and Africa structure).Claude next volume,Constab Ballads,came out in the same year and was based on his experience as a police officer in Jamaica.He left for the U.S. in 1912  to attend Tuskegee Institute,but not become an American citizen until 1940.Claude was shocked by the intense racism he encountered when he arrived in Charleston, South Carolina which inspired him to write more poetry,where many public facilities were segregated.At Tuskegee,He disliked the "semi-military,machine existence there"and quickly left to study at Kansas State University.At Kansas State,he read W.E.B. Du Bois'Souls of Black Folk,which had a major impact on him and stirred his political involvement.But despite superior academic performance, in 1914 Claude decided he did not want to be an agronomist and moved to New York,where he married his childhood sweetheart Eulalie Lewars.He published two poems in 1917 in Seven Ants under the Alias Eli Edwards while working as a waiter on the railways.In 1919 he met Crystal and Max Eastman,who produced The Liberator (where he would serve as co-Executive Editor until 1922).It was here that he published one of  his most famous poems,"If We must Die",during the "Red Summer", a period of intense racial violence against black people in Anglo-American societies.This was among a page of his poetry which signaled the commencement of his life as a professional writer.During his time with the Liberator, he may have had affairs with men, including Waldo Frank and Edward Arlington Robinson.Later in Paris he may have had a sexual relationship with Canadian writer John Glass co,but details on any any of this are few.Claude became involved with a group of black radicals who were unhappy both with Marcus Garvey's nationalism and the middle class reformist NAACP.These included other Caribbean  writers such as Cyril Briggs,Richard B. Moore and Wilfried Domingo.They fought for black self-determination within the context of socialist revolution.Together they founded the semi-secret revolutionary organization,the African Blood Brotherhood.Hubert Harrison had asked Claude to write for Marcus Negro World,but only a few copies have survived from this period,none of which contain articles by Claude.He soon left for London,England.He arrived in London in autumn 1919.He used to frequent a soldier's club in Drury Lane and the international Socialist Club in Shoreditch.A militant atheist,he also joined the Rationalist Press Association.It was during this period that Claude commitment to socialism deepened and he read Marx assiduously.At the international Socialist Club,Claude met Shapurji Saklatvala,A.J. Cook,Guy Aldred,Jack Tanner,Arthur Mcmanus,William Gallagher,Sylvia Pankhurst and George Lansbury.He was soon invited to write for the Workers'Dreadnought.In 1920,the Daily Herald,a socialist paper  published by George Lansbury,included a racist written by E.D. Morel,Entitled "Black Scourage in Europe: Sexual Horror Let Loose by France on the Rhine",it insinuated gross hypersexuality on black people in general,but George refused to print Claude response.This response then appeared in Workers Dreadnought and the Workers' Socialist Federation,a Council Communist group active in the East End and which had a majority of women involved in it all levels of the organization.He became a paid journalist for the paper,some people claim he was the first black journalist in Britain.Claude attended the Communist Unity Conference which established the Communist Party of Great Britain.From November 1922 to June  1923,he visited the Soviet Union and attended the fourth congress of the Communist international in Moscow.There he met many leading Bolsheviks including Leon Trotsky,Nikolai Bukharin and Karl Radek.He wrote the manuscripts for a book of essays called Negroes in America and three stories published as Lynching in America,both of which appeared first in Russian and were re-translated into English.Claude original English manuscripts have been lost.In 1928,Claude published his most famous novel,Home to Harlem,which won the Harmon Gold Award for Literature.The Novel,which depicted street life in Harlem,would have a major impact on black intellectuals in the Caribbean,West Africa,and Europe.Claude novel gained a substantial readership,especially with people who wanted to know more about the intense,and sometimes shocking,details of Harlem nightlife.His novel was an attempt to capture the energetic and intense spirit of the "uprooted black vagabonds.""Home to Harlem was a work in which Claude looked among the common people for a distinctive black identity.Despite this,the book drew fire from one of his heroes,W.E.B.Du Bois.To him the novel's frank depictions of sexuality and the nightlife in Harlem only appealed to the "pruient  demand[s]"of white readers and publishers looking for portrayals of black "licentiousness."As W.E.B. said,"Home to Harlem...for the most part nauseates  me,and after the dirtier parts of its fifthi feel like taking a bath.Modern critics now dismiss this criticism from W.E.B.,who was more concerned with using art as propaganda in the struggle for African American political liberation than in the value of art to showcase the truth about the lives of black people.Claude other novels were Banjo (1930),and Banana Bottom (1933).Banjo was noted in part for its portrayal of how the French treated black colonist,as the novel centers on black seamen in Marseilles.Cesaire stated that in Banjo,blacks were described truthfully and without "inhibition or prejudice".Banana Bottom was his third novel.The book is said to follow a prinicipal theme of a black individual in search of establishing a cultural identity in a white society.The book discusses underlying racial and cultural tensions.He also authored a collection of short stories,Gingertown (1932),and two autobiographical books,A Long Way From Home(1937) and Harlem: Negro Metropolis (1940).His book of collected poems,Selected poems,(1953),and his second autobiography,My, Green Hills, of Jamaica (1979),were published posthumously.Becoming disiliusioned with communism,Claude embraced the social teachings of the Roman Catholic Church,to which he converted in 1944.He died from a heart attack at the age of 59.