50 Facts About Claude McKay

Festus Claudius "Claude" McKay OJ was a Jamaican-American writer and poet.

Claude McKay was a central figure in the Harlem Renaissance.

Claude McKay moved to New York City in 1914 and, in 1919, he wrote "If We Must Die", one of his best known works, a widely reprinted sonnet responding to the wave of white-on-black race riots and lynchings following the conclusion of the First World War.

Besides these novels and four published collections of poetry, Claude McKay authored a collection of short stories, Gingertown ; two autobiographical books, A Long Way from Home and My Green Hills of Jamaica ; and Harlem: Negro Metropolis, consisting of eleven essays on the contemporary social and political history of Harlem and Manhattan, concerned especially with political, social and labor organizing.

Claude McKay's 1922 poetry collection, Harlem Shadows, was among the first books published during the Harlem Renaissance and his novel Home To Harlem was a watershed contribution to its fiction.

In Russia, Claude McKay was widely feted by the Communist Party.

Festus Claudius McKay, known as Claude McKay, was born September 15,1890, in Nairne Castle near James Hill in upper Clarendon Parish, Jamaica.

Claude McKay referred to his home village as Sunny Ville, a name given to the area by locals.

Claude McKay was the youngest child of Thomas Francis McKay and Hannah Ann Elizabeth Edwards, well-to-do farmers who had enough property to qualify to vote.

Claude McKay's parents were active and well-respected members of the Baptist faith.

Claude McKay recounted that his father would often share stories of Ashanti customs with the family.

Claude McKay started writing poetry of his own at the age of 10.

Jekyll convinced Claude McKay to write in his native dialect, and set some of Claude McKay's verses to music.

Jekyll helped Claude McKay publish his first book of poems, Songs of Jamaica, in 1912.

The poem is set in New York and was written while Claude McKay lived there as a laborer.

Claude McKay left for the US in 1912 to attend Tuskegee Institute.

Claude McKay was shocked by the intense racism he encountered when he arrived in Charleston, South Carolina, where many public facilities were segregated; this inspired him to write more poetry.

Claude McKay published two poems in 1917 in The Seven Arts under the pseudonym Eli Edwards.

In 1918 Claude McKay met Frank Harris, then editor of Pearson's Magazine.

In 1919, Claude McKay met Crystal and Max Eastman, publishers of The Liberator magazine, where Claude McKay would serve as co-executive editor until 1922.

Claude McKay became involved with a group of black radicals who were unhappy both with Marcus Garvey's nationalism and the middle-class reformist NAACP.

Hubert Harrison had asked Claude McKay to write for Garvey's Negro World, but only a few copies of the paper have survived from this period, none of which contain any articles by Claude McKay.

In early fall 1919 Claude McKay traveled to London, perhaps prompted by pressure from the Justice Department which was engaged in a nationwide attack on pacifists, socialists and labor organizers which especially targeted the IWW.

In London, Claude McKay moved in socialist and literary circles; he frequented two clubs, a soldiers' club in Drury Lane, and the International Socialist Club in Shoreditch.

Claude McKay was invited to write for Pankhurst's magazine, Workers' Dreadnought.

Since January 1920, Claude McKay had been involved with the Workers' Dreadnought and the Workers' Socialist Federation, a council communist group active in the East End with a majority of women at all levels of the organization.

Claude McKay worked closely with the Finnish Bolshevik Erkki Veltheim.

Claude McKay attended the Communist Unity Conference that established the Communist Party of Great Britain.

When Sylvia Pankhurst was arrested under the Defence of the Realm Act for publishing articles "calculated and likely to cause sedition among His Majesty's forces, in the Navy, and among the civilian population," Claude McKay had his rooms searched.

Claude McKay is likely to have been the author of "The Yellow Peril and the Dockers" attributed to "Leon Lopez", which was one of the articles cited by the government in its case against Workers' Dreadnought.

Claude McKay was invited to Russia during the reconstruction of the country by the Communist Party led by Lenin.

Claude McKay financed his trip to Russia by repackaging and selling Harlem Shadows, "complete with a signed photograph and an inflated price tag" to members of an NAACP donor list and conserved the funds thus raised by working his way across the Atlantic from New York to Liverpool as a stoker on a freighter.

Claude McKay wrote about his travels in Morocco in his 1937 autobiography A Long Way from Home.

In 1943 Claude McKay started "Cycle Manuscript", a collection of 54 poems, all but four of them sonnets, often with political subjects and often in tones of satiric invective.

Claude McKay flourished as a poet during the Harlem Renaissance in the 1920s.

Claude McKay wrote tales about the trials and tribulations of life as a black man in both Jamaica and America.

Claude McKay was not secretive about his hatred for racism, and felt that racist people were stupid, shortsighted, and possessed with hatred.

In tales such as Home to Harlem, his depictions were initially criticized as a negative portrayal of Harlem and its lower-class citizens by prominent figures such as W E B DuBois, but McKay was later applauded as a literary force in the Harlem Renaissance.

Claude McKay divested himself from many aspects and growing prescriptions of modernism.

In need of money, Claude McKay posed nude for the Cubist painter Andre Lhote.

Claude McKay critically recalled the experience in various ways in many of his most notable works.

Claude McKay believed that the Communists in the US had other things on their agenda, which did not include African Americans.

Claude McKay was bisexual; he pursued relationships with both men and women throughout his life.

Claude McKay worked with Harlem's Friendship House, a branch of the Catholic interracial apostolate founded in the early 1930s in Toronto, Canada.

Claude McKay relocated to Chicago, Illinois, where he joined a Catholic organization as a teacher.

Claude McKay developed health problems by the mid-1940s, enduring several illnesses until he died of heart failure in 1948.

In 1928, Claude McKay published his most famous novel, Home to Harlem, which won the Harmon Gold Award for Literature.

Claude McKay authored a collection of short stories, Gingertown, two autobiographical books, A Long Way from Home and My Green Hills of Jamaica, and a non-fiction, socio-historical treatise entitled Harlem: Negro Metropolis.

Claude McKay's Selected Poems represents his selection and arrangement of 1947, but he was unable to find a publisher for it and it appeared posthumously six years later.

Claude McKay is regarded as the "foremost left-wing black intellectual of his age" and his work heavily influenced a generation of black authors including James Baldwin and Richard Wright.