Claude McKay

Festus Claudius McKay was born on 15 September 1889 in Sunny Ville, Jamaica, and began writing poetry in Jamaican Patois dialect as a young man, publishing two collections while still in Jamaica before moving to the United States in 1912 to study agriculture, though he soon abandoned formal studies to pursue writing full-time in New York.

McKay became a significant figure within Harlem's flourishing literary scene during the years preceding the Harlem Renaissance's fuller emergence, and his 1919 sonnet 'If We Must Die,' written in direct response to the wave of violent racial attacks against Black communities during the 'Red Summer' of 1919, became one of the most significant and widely quoted poems of the era, its defiant call for resistance against violent oppression resonating far beyond its immediate context.

McKay's 1922 poetry collection Harlem Shadows is widely regarded as a foundational text helping launch the Harlem Renaissance's fuller literary emergence, its combination of formally accomplished verse with direct engagement with Black urban experience and racial injustice establishing a template that subsequent Renaissance poets would build upon.

McKay travelled extensively throughout the 1920s and 1930s, including significant time in the Soviet Union, where he was warmly received as a symbol of international proletarian and anti-colonial solidarity, and in France and Morocco, building an international perspective that distinguished him from Harlem Renaissance contemporaries more consistently based in the United States.

McKay published Home to Harlem in 1928, a novel examining Black urban working-class life that became the first bestselling novel by a Black American author, achieving significant commercial success though it also drew criticism from some contemporaries, including W.E.B. Du Bois, who felt its frank depiction of Harlem's working-class and nightlife culture reinforced damaging stereotypes rather than presenting more socially respectable representations of Black life.

McKay converted to Catholicism later in life and continued writing until his death in 1948. He remains remembered as a foundational figure whose early poetry, particularly 'If We Must Die,' helped establish literary and political templates that the broader Harlem Renaissance would build upon, his international perspective and willingness to depict Black urban life without sanitisation representing a genuinely significant and sometimes contested contribution to the movement's diverse literary legacy.