Festus Claudius McKay was perhaps the most radical of the young black writers who came to prominence during the Harlem Renaissance of the 1920s. Shaped by an attraction to genteel British culture, especially the romantic tradition, derived from his upbringing in Jamaica and shocked into a realization of color prejudices there as well as those he encountered in the United States, McKay struck out in his poetry against confinement from any quarter. Bringing radical sentiments to the sonnet form, he earned a reputation as an uncompromising firebrand. With the publication of the sonnet "If We Must Die" in the Liberator in 1919 and the appearance of Harlem Shadows in 1922, McKay distinguished himself as a new voice in American and especially black American poetry.

McKay was born in the parish of Clarendon in Sunny Ville, Jamaica, British West Indies, on 15 September 1889 to peasant farmers Thomas Francis McKay and Ann Elizabeth...