Born in Jamaica, Claude McKay moved to the United States in 1912 to attend college. His encounter with W. E. B. Du Bois's work sparked his political consciousness. Settling in New York City in 1914, McKay became a key figure of the Harlem Renaissance. In 1919, he wrote "If We Must Die," a powerful sonnet responding to post-WWI racial violence, which established him as a major literary voice. His 1922 poetry collection, Harlem Shadows, was one of the earliest and most influential publications of the movement.
McKay was also a prolific novelist and essayist. His bestselling 1928 novel, Home to Harlem, won the Harmon Gold Award for Literature and served as a watershed moment for Harlem Renaissance fiction. He followed this success with novels like Banjo (1929) and Banana Bottom (1933), the short story collection Gingertown (1932), and the sociological study Harlem: Negro Metropolis (1940). His autobiographical work, A Long Way from Home (1937), captured his global travels and intellectual development.
Throughout his life, McKay engaged deeply with social and political movements. Initially drawn to socialism and the Industrial Workers of the World, he traveled to the Soviet Union in 1922. However, disillusioned by the authoritarianism and manipulation of the Soviet regime, he spent the next decade living in Europe and North Africa. Upon returning to Harlem in 1934, he frequently clashed with local communist factions, a struggle satirized in his posthumously published novel Amiable With Big Teeth. In his final years, facing illness and poverty, he converted to Catholicism before his death in 1948.
