Mckay, Claude | Research & Encyclopedia Articles

Claude Mckay

Born September 15, 1890

Sunny Ville, Jamaica

Died May 22, 1948

Chicago, Illinois

Jamaican-born American poet, journalist, essayist, and novelist

"All my life I have been a troubadour wanderer, nourishing myself mainly on the poetry of existence."

One of the most talented and respected younger writers of the Harlem Renaissance, Festus Claudius McKay, better known as Claude McKay, set himself apart from his colleagues by spending most of the 1920s living outside the United States. His radical political views and scorn for those he saw as compromising their own ideals meant that he was only a reluctant member of the New Negro movement, as Harlem's era of artistic and cultural growth was then called. Nevertheless, McKay wrote some of the period's best poetry and one of its most revealing novels, and he was much admired not only by his contemporaries but by later generations of writers and thinkers. Although McKay's poetry features traditional rhyme schemes and forms, especially the fourteen-line sonnet, it is filled with revolutionary ideas and a strong sense of the injustice that African Americans had endured for centuries. In fact, McKay's poem "If We Must Die" was probably the strongest statement against racism that had appeared up to that time, and many consider its publication the event that marked the beginning of the Harlem Renaissance.

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