Claude McKay

From Jamaica Wiki

Claude McKay was a renowned Jamaican communist and a writer. His work ‘Home to Carlem’ won the Harmon Gold Award for Literature and it brought out the true condition of black people’s life during the period.

Contents 1 CHILDHOOD 2 The Admirable Career 3 His Works

[edit] CHILDHOOD

Claude McKay was born as the youngest son to Thomas McKay, a peasant, in Clarendon, Jamaica. It was Walter Jekyll who helped him in publishing his “Songs of Jamaica’ (1912), a book of poems, first one to be done in Jamaican Creole. In the same year, ‘Constab ballads’, his next volume came out. Claude’s elder brother educated him. Claude was shocked to see the intensity of racism prevailing in Charleston, South California, and USA when he went to Booker. T. Washington’s Tuskegee Institute. Soon he moved to Kansas State University, from which his active political involvement was seen. W. E. B Du Bois Souls of Black had a great impact on him.

Claude never wanted to be an agronomist, went to New York and married Eulalie Lewars, his childhood sweet heart. She returned back to Jamaica shortly after that.

[edit] The Admirable Career

He published Seven Arts with a pseudo name Eli Edwards. Crystal and Max Eastman produced ‘The liberator’ and Claude was the co-executive editor. His famous ‘If We must Die’, the collection of poems was released during this period, during the ‘Red Summer’. He was also involved with a team of black radicals along with African Caribbean Cyril Briggs, Richard B. Moore and Wilfred Domingo (they formed what was called as ‘African Blood Brotherhood’); they were against Marcus Garvey’s philosophy and the NAACP (middle class reformist).

Garvey’s ‘Negro World’ was requested to be written in some parts by McKay, being approached by Hubert Harrison. But prove of it does not exists from the remaining parts. McKay’s socialistic thinking got uplift with his readings of Karl Marx when he was at International Socialist Club, where he had the opportunity to meet many great men. He was invited to work on ‘Worker’s Dreadnought’, through which he later brought out his true and factual response to Lansbury’s (publisher of Daily Herald) racist article written by E.D.Morel. Then he was regularly involved with the Worker’s Dreadnought and the communist group ‘Worker’s Social Federation’. Claimed to be the first paid black writer in Britain, he attended the Communist Unity Conference, which formed Great Britain’s communist’s party.

[edit] His Works

His famous and award winning work, ‘Home to Harlem’ was published in 1928. But the work which depicted the black people in the streets of Harlem, gained its own critics including W. E. B Du Bois. This was due to the explicit way of portrayal of offensive things. But this view of W. E. B Du Bois were and are dismissed for the most part, for his concern for the art was more felt in his view. He has to his credit the novels Banjo (1929) and Banana Bottom (1933), a short story collection ‘Gingertown’ and autobiographical ventures of ‘A Long Way from Home’ and ‘Negro Metropolis’. His poetry works include ‘Selected poems’ (a collection of poetry) and ‘Harlem Shadows’.