Once, on being asked his nationality, Claude McKay flippantly answered that he preferred to think of himself as an "internationalist." Though lightly given, the answer was not far off the mark. Born a British subject in Jamaica, McKay immigrated to the United States in 1912 and in 1914 adopted Harlem as his permanent base. From 1919 until 1924, however, he spent little time in New York City. From 1919 to 1921 he was in London, and after a return to New York, he made a pilgrimage to Russia in 1922-1923, where he was lionized by the leaders of the revolution and the Russian people. After Russia he went, by way of Germany, to France, where, excepting several trips to North Africa, he would remain until he returned to Harlem in 1934.

Arriving in Paris in the fall of 1923, McKay found a world of "radicals, esthetes, painters and writers, pseudo-artists, [and] bohemian tourists--all mixed tolerantly and...