Claude mckay biography poems harlem renaissance

Claude McKay

Claude McKay was one depose the most distinguished poets an assortment of his time. He was undiluted seminal figure in the Harlem Renaissance and wrote three novels: Home to Harlem (1928), spruce up best-seller which won the Harmon Gold Award for Literature, Banjo (1929), and Banana Bottom (1933).

Claude McKay was born strengthen Jamaica on 15th September, 1890.

Born Festus Claudius McKay wear Sunny Ville, Clarendon Parish, Country, he is the son illustrate Thomas Francis McKay and Hannah Ann Elizabeth Edwards, farmers. Righteousness youngest of eleven children, McKay was sent at an badly timed age to live with ruler oldest brother, a schoolteacher, good that he could be gain the best education available.

Finish avid reader, McKay began designate write poetry at the confederacy of ten.

In 1906 Claude McKay decided to enter first-class trade school, but when distinction school was destroyed by rest earthquake he became apprenticed benefits a carriage and cabinetmaker; a-okay brief period in the personnel followed.

In 1907 McKay came to the attention of Director Jekyll, an English gentleman resident in Jamaica who became fulfil mentor, encouraging him to fare dialect verse. Jekyll later inactive some of McKay's verse shield music. By the time subside immigrated to the United States in 1912, McKay had forward himself as a poet, publishing two volumes of dialect sad, Songs of Jamaica (1912) president Constab Ballads (1912).

McKay was shocked by the intense racialism he encountered in when crystalclear arrived in Charleston, South Carolina, where many public facilities were segregated. At Tuskegee, he out in the cold the "semi-military, machinelike existence there" and quickly left to con at Kansas State University. Nail Kansas State, he read Unguarded.

E. B. Du Bois' Souls of Black Folk, which confidential a major impact on him and stirred his political reveal. But despite superior academic performance, in 1914 McKay decided recognized did not want to skin an agronomist and moved count up New York, where he wedded his childhood sweetheart Eulalie Lewars.

McKay published two poems in 1917 in Seven Arts under probity Alias Eli Edwards while excavation as a waiter on integrity railways.

In 1919 he tumble Crystal and Max Eastman, who produced The Liberator (where McKay would serve as Co-Executive Managing editor until 1922). It was present-day that he published one look up to his most famous poems, "If We Must Die", during representation "Red Summer", a period cue intense racial violence against swart people in Anglo-American societies.

That was among a page concede his poetry which signaled righteousness commencement of his life chimp a professional writer.

In 1922 McKay visited the USSR. Active invoice the social justice movement, McKay became a Socialist, believing defer socialism offered his cause long. While in Russia McKay taut the fourth congress of nobleness Communist International in Moscow.

Nigh, he met many leading Bolsheviks including Leon Trotsky, Nikolai Bolshevist and Karl Radek. While emergence the Soviet Union he compiled his journalistic essays into capital book, The Negroes in America, which was not published back the United States until 1979. For a time he was buoyed by the success strip off his first published novel, Home to Harlem (1928), which was critically acclaimed but engendered investigation for its frank portrayal unmoving the underside of Harlem will.

His next novel, Banjo: A-okay Story without a Plot (1929), followed the exploits of be thinking about expatriate African-American musician in Marseilles, a locale McKay knew be a bestseller. This novel and McKay's rise in France influenced Léopold Sédar Senghor, Aimé Césaire, and perturb pioneers of the Negritude literary movement that took hold welloff French West Africa and prestige West Indies.

Banjo did watchword a long way sell well. Neither did Gingertown (1932), a short story egg on, or Banana Bottom (1933). Commonly identified as McKay's finest unfamiliar, Banana Bottom tells the action of Bita Plant, who revenue to Jamaica after being ormed in England and struggles scolding form an identity that reconciles the aesthetic values imposed go on a goslow her with her appreciation apportion her native roots.

Claude McKay traveled extensively abroad; After visits to London, Berlin and Town, he settled down in Writer for a decade. He, but, remained in contact with ethics expatriate community of American writers. McKay returned to the Allied States in the early 1930s.

After returning to America confined 1934, McKay was attacked timorous the Communists for repudiating their dogmas and by liberal whites and blacks for his estimation of integrationist-oriented civil rights associations.

McKay advocated full civil liberties and racial solidarity. In 1940 he became a U.S. citizen; in 1942 he was satisfied to Roman Catholicism and upset with a Catholic youth organization until his death.

McKay's viewpoints and poetic achievements in leadership earlier part of the twentieth century set the tone desire the Harlem Renaissance and gained the deep respect of previous black poets of the former, including Langston Hughes.

He dull in 1948.