Claude McKay

Biography

American poet and novelist Claude McKay was born on the West Indian island of Jamaica in 1890. His parents were poor farmworkers, and Claude got no formal education, although an older brother did give him some informal elementary education. At age 14 he went to the capital city of Kingston to make his fortune, and he eventually secured a job as an officer in the city police department. In his off time he began writing poetry using local dialects, and it wasn't long before he was considered to be the "poet laureate" of the colony, albeit unofficially. By age 22 he had two books of poems published. He was the first black Jamaican to receive a medal from the Institute of Arts and Sciences. The prize also came with a monetary award, and McKay used that money to move to the US, where he settled in Tuskegee, Alabama, and attended the world-famous Tuskegee Institute. After two years there he transferred to Kansas State College, where he studied agriculture. He was there only a few months before he decided that agriculture wasn't for him, and he used what money he had left over from the Institute prize to move to New York City. There he opened a restaurant, which went out of business after a short time, and had to take jobs waiting tables to earn money. He began to write poetry again, and several of his works were published under the name of "Eli Edwards". He began to gather a following among critics and reviewers, and in 1918 he traveled to London, England, where he worked as a reporter on a pacifist newspaper. Upon his return to New York in 1919 he joined "The Liberator" as associate editor, a position he held until 1922. In that year he traveled again to Europe, first to the Soviet Union as an observer at a meeting of the Communist International, then to France, where he stayed for ten years. His health declined rapidly, and when he was told that he could possibly contract tuberculosis, he made arrangements to stay in the much healthier climes of the French Riviera in the sunny south of France. For a time he worked at the Nice studios of expatriate American director Rex Ingram, and then spent some time recovering his health in North Africa, mainly Morocco. It was while he was overseas that his first novel, "Home to Harlem", was published in the US and became a rousing success. McKay became known as one of the leading figures of the "Negro literary renaissance" of the 1920s, and his poems and stories pulled no punches in their condemnation of the rampant racism that existed in the US in those times. Claude McKay died in Chicago, IL, of congestive heart failure on May 22, 1948. He was 57 years old.