Claude McKay
Born: September 15, 1890 (Jamaica)
Died: May 22, 1948 (Chicago, IL)
Biography
Claude McKay, born Festus Claudius McKay in Sunny Ville, Jamaica in 1890, was a writer, poet, and key figure in the Harlem Renaissance, a prominent literary movement of the 1920s.
His work ranged from vernacular verse celebrating peasant life in Jamaica to poems that protested racial and economic inequities. His philosophically ambitious fiction, including tales of Black life in both Jamaica and America, addresses instinctual/intellectual duality, which McKay found central to the Black individual’s efforts to cope in a racist society. He is the author of The Passion of Claude McKay: Selected Poetry and Prose (1973), The Dialectic Poetry of Claude McKay (1972), Selected Poems (1953), Harlem Shadows (1922), Constab Ballads (1912), and Songs of Jamaica (1912), among many other books of poetry and prose.
