| The 1920s witnessed an extraordinary flowering of literary and artistic creativity among African Americans. Critics hailed the emergence of a "New Negro," who took pride in the black race and its African heritage, and whose writings exposed and attacked discrimination, explored black folk culture, and strove to create a unique African-American literature. Yet for all its vitality, the cultural movement best known as the Harlem Renaissance was fraught with tensions: between the ideal of Africa and the reality of America; between the lure of a romanticized rural past and the demands of an alien urban present; between the need to affirm the uniqueness of black culture and the desire to achieve acceptance by the majority white culture. |
| Perhaps more than any other Harlem Renaissance figure, Claude McKay embodied these contradictory impulses. A Jamaican immensely proud of his peasant heritage, he abandoned his homeland, immigrated to the United States, and embarked on a career as a writer. A political radical contemptuous of all things middle class, he embraced and later rejected communism, and eventually converted to Roman Catholicism. A poet whose verse breathed militance, anger, and alienation, he dreamed of transcending racial categories and developed his closest relationships with white intellectuals. |
| Not surprisingly, contemporary judgments of McKay reflected these paradoxes. He was derided as a "racial opportunist," a "black fascist," a propagandist, and a charlatan. Yet he was also widely regarded as a literary genius and became the first black writer to make the best-seller list. |
| This book is an interpretation of the life and work of Claude McKay. My aim is twofold: to offer a psychological portrait of a complex, deeply conflicted literary figure, and to use McKay's life as a vehicle for analyzing the larger problems of identity, vocation, and politics that confronted black intellectuals and artists during the interwar years. Drawing upon a wide range of archival |
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