While Jamaican émigré, New Negro author Claude McKay’s desired reading public by the mid-1920s became and remained the general American readership, at various moments during the (Long) Harlem Renaissance he enjoyed a diverse if limited reception. After early attention in Jamaica as the British Crown Colony’s first Black poet to publish a collection of verse, McKay eventually gained a measure of notice among North American politically progressive poetry enthusiasts, and then at various stages of his career gathered interest among British, French, Pan-African, and even Russian readerships. In the late 1920s, when McKay’s novel Home to Harlem became a bestseller, the New Negro author believed his star was finally rising with the broad spectrum of US readers, but the novel’s popularity was momentary, and the author’s glory transpired to be fleeting. In his lifetime, McKay never again realized the level of popular American readership he sought. During the early 1920s, the concept of an emergent, transnational American identity forged McKay’s aesthetic and accordingly his ambition to reach a US public. By the late 1930s, however, McKay rejected the idea that organized leftist politics was invested in aiding the struggling Black masses. Around the same period, he abandoned his former unique vision of a transnational America.

A product of Clarendon, Jamaica, McKay’s earliest reading public was among his Caribbean island compatriots, where at the age of 22 he published two poetry collections, both released in 1912: Songs of Jamaica and Constab Ballads. Footnote ¹ The title and content calling to mind Kipling’s two immensely popular dialect collections that included such pro-Empire verse as “Gunga Din” and “Mandalay,” the first titled Barrack-Room Ballads and Other Verses (1892), Constab Ballads reflected McKay’s stint in the Jamaican Constabulary Force. In the vein of fin de siècle African American poet Paul Laurence Dunbar’s two poetic styles, McKay’s compilations mixed literary and dialect poetry. The Jamaica Times glowingly reviewed Songs of Jamaica, and the Daily Gleaner published a selection of his patois poetry.Footnote ² Awarded the Institute of Jamaica’s Silver Musgrave Medal, McKay did not bask long as an emergent Jamaican Bard but instead used the accompanying stipend to travel to the United States in 1912, where he enrolled at the Tuskegee Institute.Footnote ³ McKay’s stated intention was to study agronomy and eventually return to Jamaica to advise the island’s struggling farmers, though he also hoped to earn a name for himself as a poet in the US literary field, and after three years, he decided against returning to Jamaica.Footnote ⁴

McKay’s aspiration to establish a foothold for himself in the US literary sphere took some seven years, with initial interest in him arising with socially and politically progressive readers. After the brief spell at the Tuskegee Institute and then two years at Kansas State College, where he read W. E. B.’s The Souls of Black Folk, the book that presented the revolutionary theory of “double consciousness,” he made his way to New York in 1914.Footnote ⁵ McKay’s experience of living in the American South and reading Du Bois radicalized his perspective.Footnote ⁶ By 1917, he published two poems under a pseudonym in The Seven Arts, a forum for a diverse cast of leftist and countercultural intellectuals. Among the most influential contributors was Randolph Bourne, the author of the revolutionary “Trans-National America,” a 1916 critique of American Pragmatism and denunciation of compulsory assimilation, identified generally as the melting pot metaphor, in favor of a more cosmopolitan vision of the United States, where immigrants may retain their “spiritual [i.e., cultural] country” and still identify as American.Footnote ⁷ The short-lived Seven Arts was coedited by Waldo Frank, who soon would publish his radical transnational vision, Our America.Footnote ⁸ Frank’s close friend Jean Toomer developed his own cosmopolitan views of American identity, rendered in the literary genre-mixing, early Harlem Renaissance text Cane.Footnote ⁹ The concept of an emergent, transnational American identity forged McKay’s aesthetic and accordingly his ambition to reach a US public.

The next year McKay moved toward the mainstream, publishing more of his poetry along with an essay outlining his biography and perspective on poetics in the September 1918 issue of Frank Harris’s Pearson’s Magazine. Footnote ¹⁰ And in 1919, he met Max Eastman, the friendship leading to his greatest triumph thus far, publishing an assortment of poems in Eastman’s the Liberator, a magazine with appeal among American progressives.Footnote ¹¹ Among these poems was McKay’s cri de coeur “If We Must Die,” inspired by the white supremacist violence of the Red Summer of 1919. At the time, McKay worked as a Pullman car waiter and was likely a member of the underground, racially mixed socialist labor union the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW). Eventually located in Harlem and spending much of his time in Greenwich Village, McKay found himself negotiating his way through diverse if intersecting groups: Black, white, leftist, bohemian, and Caribbean migrant. McKay was motivated by an enthusiasm for internationalist socialist politics to relocate to London at the opening of the 1920s where for over a year he worked as a journalist for Sylvia Pankhurst’s splinter socialist periodical Workers’ Dreadnought. Footnote ¹² His first publishing breakthrough after Jamaica taking place not in the United States but in Britain, he published Spring in New Hampshire and Other Poems.Footnote ¹³

When McKay returned to the United States in 1921, Eastman invited him to coedit the Liberator with the Communist writer Michael Gold, and he expanded the slim, London-published volume into Harlem Shadows, released by the established Manhattan publishing house, Harcourt, Brace and Company.Footnote ¹⁴ Harlem Shadows formed McKay’s literary reputation among American progressives and poetry enthusiasts, and he now had the potential for a passage into the nation’s wider reading public with the emergent New Negro movement as his vehicle. The collection included “If We Must Die” along with such verse as “The Tropics in New York,” “On a Primitive Canoe,” “The Harlem Dancer,” and “Baptism.” Also included was the 1921 sonnet “America,” which displays not only McKay’s ambivalence about his chosen home but also the complex disposition with respect to his pursued public, even during the early stages of the Harlem Renaissance: “Although she feeds me bread of bitterness, / And sinks into my throat her tiger’s tooth, / Stealing my breath of life, I will confess/I love this cultured hell that tests my youth.”Footnote ¹⁵

As McKay worked to cultivate interest in the US literary scene, he contributed to the growing literature of the evolving, revolutionary Pan-Africanist movement. In the early 1920s, encouraged by New Negro radical Hubert Harrison, McKay published articles in fellow Jamaican Marcus Garvey’s Negro World, a magazine with a mass international circulation among members of the Universal Negro Improvement Association.Footnote ¹⁶ While serving briefly as co-editor of the Liberator, McKay assisted in the founding of the underground revolutionary organization the African Blood Brotherhood (ABB), a small society partly inspired by the secretive IWW, making the Liberator’s offices available for the ABB’s meetings.Footnote ¹⁷ Consistent with the IWW internationalist, anti-segregationist ideology, McKay’s view was that revolutionary Pan-Africanists must join in common cause with the worldwide, organized white proletariat. On December 17, 1919, McKay wrote to Garvey: “[R]adical Negroes should be more interested in the white radical movements. … I don’t mean that we should accept them unreservedly + put one cause into their hands. No: They are fighting their own battle + so are we; but at present we meet on common ground against the common enemy.”Footnote ¹⁸

Another early encounter with a discrete reading public came in 1923 when for a brief period the New Negro writer enjoyed a Russian readership that almost certainly surpassed his American audience. Traveling to Moscow and presenting himself as an ABB independent representative in 1922, McKay observed the Fourth Congress of the Comintern. He would later refer to his Russian visit as his “Magic Pilgrimage,” when he reconnected with friend Max Eastman, met a number of Communist Party leaders, and was celebrated by the Russian masses as the voice of the Black proletariat.Footnote ¹⁹ He interviewed Peoples’ Commissar for Military and Naval Affairs Leon Trotsky, who invited him as an influential Black intellectual to remain in the Soviet Union for several months as a guest of the state. Trotsky also encouraged McKay to spread the internationalist revolutionary message to Black workers when he left Russia.Footnote ²⁰ The year after he left Russia, the Soviet state press published two of his books in translation: Negri v Amerike (“The Negroes in America”); and his first short fiction collection, Sudom lincha (“Trial by Lynching”).Footnote ²¹ On July 8, 1923, McKay wrote to journalist and activist Walter White from Berlin, posted under another nom de plume, proud of his Russian books and hoping to see one published in the United States: “I am back out of Russia after a great triumphal trip there. [Although] I am a Communist, I am a fearless champion of race rights even when that championship should reflect in the American Comrades. … I have done a book on the Negro [i.e., The Negroes in America] in Russia treating the whole question from the economic end. … It is translated in Russian and now I am trying to place it in America.”Footnote ²² The Negroes in America would not appear in print until decades after McKay’s death.

Fatefully, McKay’s successful Soviet sojourn caused him to become a target of US state surveillance, which would obliquely affect his opportunities as a Black author. McKay was aware of the continuing climate of right-wing, anti-immigrant paranoia in the United States, exemplified by Lothrop Stoddard’s The Rising Tide of Color: The Threat Against White World-Supremacy.Footnote ²³ What he almost certainly did not know is that his attendance of the Soviet Comintern in Moscow provoked the US State Department to take an interest in his activities, leading to the Bureau of Investigation (later the FBI) creating a fat classified file on him. The state in fact became another of McKay’s readerships, if a deeply perverse one, as his dossier includes obsessive analyses of “America” and other poems as evidence of a Black subversive threat against the nation. After McKay’s months in Russia, he moved on briefly to Weimar-period Berlin, then relocated to Paris. McKay would wind up remaining, unplanned, for several years in France.

While McKay regarded himself as a radical during much of the 1920s, a period during which poetry underwent a profound transformation, he almost never veered from traditional poetics, his avowed influences continuing to be those he had emulated as a Jamaican Bard: the British Romantics and the Victorians. During the 1920s, two trends emerged in American poetry that vividly swayed public taste, modernism (avant-guard free verse, starting with the Imagist movement) and vernacularism. When McKay arrived in the United States in 1912, American poetry was on the verge of the earthshaking modernist turn. In March 1913, Ezra Pound published “A Few Don’ts by an Imagiste,” widely regarded as the earliest modernist manifesto of American poetry.Footnote ²⁴ Abandoning classical form, diction, content, and theme, modernist poetry was distinguished by T. S. Eliot’s intellectually demanding, fragmented verse, commonly shunning the idea of poetry as a medium for political and social commentary. Modernist poets endeavored to fashion a verse that was generally unconcerned with what they often regarded as the transience of modern social and political existence.

North American folk vernacular poetry, characterized in African American poetry by Langston Hughes’s blues and jazz poems, situated itself as antithetic to the modernist commitment to abstruse nuance and distrust of art that suggested social themes. Dedicating its aesthetic to the diverse, democratizing voices of American experience and expression, vernacularism sought inspiration from the common, regional speech of the working-classes, ethnic cultures, and other disregarded voices across social fields. In vivid contrast with the modernist school, Black folk-inflected vernacular language poetry generally imparted messages that confronted racist ideologies, among its aims to supplant the blackface minstrel fiction published in mainstream American periodicals.Footnote ²⁵

McKay did not participate, however, in either the modernist verse revolution or the New Negro movement folk vernacular recuperation project. Although McKay admired some modernist poetry, he practically never tried his hand at vers libre. In a January 9, 1917 letter to white literary critic and NAACP cofounder Joel E. Spingarn, McKay sketches out the verse aesthetic that he would adhere to until the end of his life: “I was nourished or, to be correct, nourished myself on the old forms.… the sonnet I find admirable for a moment’s thought. I am prone to be diffuse + repetitive and rhyme and metre help to check these faults.”Footnote ²⁶ After McKay’s two 1912 Jamaican collections, moreover, he never again generated dialect poetry. While many of his poems expressed overt political and social themes, he almost exclusively composed verse in established forms, from his literary verse written in Jamaica to his very last efforts. His favored form was a slight variation on the Shakespearean sonnet, as in “If We Must Die,” “America,” and “The White House,” its final heroic couplet ending with a courtly poetic diction: “Oh, I must keep my heart inviolate/Against the potent poison of your hate.”Footnote ²⁷

James Weldon Johnson’s preface to The Book of American Negro Poetry (1922) offers an insight into the formation of early 1920s New Negro poetics and McKay’s lifelong commitment to writing traditional, literary verse. Johnson expresses his genuine admiration for Dunbar’s art but is ambivalent about the range of vernacular poetry, calling instead for “a form that is freer and larger than dialect, … but also capable of voicing the deepest and highest emotions and aspirations” of modern Black consciousness, and Johnson singles out McKay as a model voice of emerging African American poetry.Footnote ²⁸

McKay’s well-known conflict with renaissance midwife Alain Locke over the dissemination of his poetry provides another insight into how the author deemed his literary art and his intentions regarding his targeted public. While guest editing the 1925 Harlem, Mecca of the New Negro special issue of the US magazine Survey Graphic, a collection that would define African American writing from the mid- to late 1920s, Locke was apparently anxious that the title of “The White House,” evoking one of the chief symbols of white American purity, would offend white readers. Without McKay’s consent, Locke published the sonnet as “White Houses,” and later that year Locke repeated the infringement in the groundbreaking anthology, The New Negro.Footnote ²⁹ In a state of frustration and fury, McKay wrote Locke:

The New Negro, McKay knew, would send tidal waves through the United States reading public as well as influencing how prominent publishers, editors, reviewers, and book distributors perceived the authors whose work appeared in the anthology. McKay, that is, understood that the anthology would serve as the foremost representation of Black literary arts among the universal American readership and thereby would determine how each author who appeared in its pages would be defined in the US public sphere. Given McKay’s hope to court the mainstream American public, one might expect him to have conceded some logic in Locke’s correction, but, as his correspondence restates throughout his career, an imperative was that his art be regarded as inviolable. As “The White House” says, the “heart” must remain “inviolate.” It is not surprising that as future editions of The New Negro sustained Locke’s affront, McKay never forgave him.

When McKay left the Weimar period subculture in Berlin to settle in Paris, he stepped into an environment where the twentieth-century modernist revolution was on the verge of a milestone transformation. The Lost Generation, led by Ernest Hemingway and including such novelists as John Dos Passos and James Joyce, was seizing the stage in Paris’s Latin Quarter and Montparnasse, the epicenter of the city’s literary scene. The sensation of Joyce’s challenging modernist novel Ulysses, published in 1922 by the Left Bank bookstore and Lost Generation locus Shakespeare and Company, inspired expatriate American poets to turn to fiction writing.Footnote ³¹ McKay also was stirred to write fiction in the Lost Generation atmosphere, though, as with his poetry, not in the modernist style.

McKay’s initial attempt at novel writing for the American literary scene was the now nonextant “Color Scheme.” A late June 1925 letter to bibliophile Arturo Schomburg typifies the in-absentia Black expatriate author’s many attempts to press into service influential New Negro intellectuals like Schomburg to act as his literary proxy and flog his writing with Manhattan publishers. The letter shows a McKay who saw himself as an experienced professional author with a clear strategy for disseminating “Color Scheme.” And the impressions of both the Weimar Republic-era sexual revolution and the brash Montparnasse modernist artistic transformation are present in the budding novelist’s blunt statement of confidence in his freshman novel’s innovative potential: “I make my Negro characters yarn and backbite and fuck like people the world over. … About the new firm Viking—I think I should see Knopf or Harcourt Brace first. An older firm can always sell a book better than a very new one. Especially if the book is of merit.”Footnote ³² What McKay could not have foreseen was that in the United States Ulysses had been banned for obscenity, and in this chilling environment for innovative fiction his preferred publisher, the prestigious Midtown Manhattan publisher Alfred A. Knopf, would balk at the frank sexuality of “Color Scheme.” In later letters, McKay complains to Schomburg about letting him down, and finally frustrated with the rejection of “Color Scheme,” he relates that he has destroyed the only manuscript.Footnote ³³

Following Harlem Shadows, McKay did not publish a book in the United States until 1928 when Harper and Brothers released Home to Harlem, a novel that holds fascinating dialogs with Bourne, Frank, and Toomer’s transnational American visions. The novel’s unmistakable conversation with two influential Lost Generation novels, Dos Passos’s Manhattan Transfer (1925) and, in ways both deferential and subversive, Hemingway’s The Sun Also Rises (1926), also draws attention to McKay’s intention that his creative prose should be read and disseminated as contributing to contemporary popular if trailblazing US fiction.Footnote ³⁴ McKay evidently scavenged from his own writing, moreover, as the protagonist of “Color Scheme,” the Haitian immigrant Ray, is made the secondary character of Home to Harlem. The digressive story follows African American proletarian Jake Brown, dissatisfied with the treatment as a Black US Army recruit sent to serve in the Great War, who absconds while stationed in France. Following McKay’s own crossings, Jake loiters in England for a period, then sails as a merchant sailor back to New York to resume a vagabond life in Harlem. He enjoys the jazz club and rent party nightlife, playing the field with several female characters, including an especially-liked sex worker who disappears after a single night of romance.

McKay’s notion of a transnational America is a truly cosmopolitan society. The Harlem speakeasies welcome both straight and queer, the novel depicting “pansies” and “dandies” alongside a wide range of Black humanity.Footnote ³⁵ Halfway through the novel, Jake meets Ray while the two men are working as railway Pullman waiters. The bisexual Ray is in exile due to the brutal US military occupation of Haiti, and the West Indian refugee, an intellectual like McKay himself, teaches Jake about African kingdoms and Black Caribbean resistance to enslavement and colonial rule.Footnote ³⁶ At the end of the novel, Jake reunites with the misplaced sex worker named Felice, and feeling vulnerable as a deserter, Jake decides to relocate with her to Chicago. Meanwhile, the Haitian castaway Ray, unable to cope with American racist conditions, departs for France, iterating McKay’s later passages.

Although white reviewers generally praised Home to Harlem, few identified it, as McKay intended, as a revolutionary transnational American text but rather praised the Black author for finally portraying primitive migrant Negro life.Footnote ³⁷ On the other side of the color line, Black critics, also not appreciating its cosmopolitan message, generally complained that Home to Harlem pandered to white fantasies about an exotic Negro underworld, with W. E. B. Du Bois issuing one of the severest reproofs. Two years before reviewing Home to Harlem, Du Bois had published in the NAACP magazine the Crisis a lecture titled “Criteria of Negro Art,” his contention being that New Negro authors should produce literature that reflected the fact that “all art is” political “propaganda.”Footnote ³⁸ In his June 1928 Crisis review of McKay’s novel, he raged that Home to Harlem’s “filth” made him “feel … like taking a bath.”Footnote ³⁹

By the late 1920s, Du Bois wished to declare his wrath not only against McKay but also with an iconoclastic rising generation of Harlem Renaissance artists including Hughes, Richard Bruce Nugent, and Wallace Thurman, editor of the 1926 one-off arts magazine Fire!! A Quarterly Devoted to the Younger Negro Artists. Designating its contributors the “younger Negro artists,” the aim of the magazine was to present a Black perspective that the New Negro literary establishment, like Locke and Du Bois, was incapable of reaching.Footnote ⁴⁰ At least part of what unmistakably made Du Bois feel unclean about Home to Harlem was its queer Black drag parade. The review was no doubt particularly upsetting, as Du Bois’s The Souls of Black Folk was the book that as a college student McKay had regarded as a revelation. Taking Du Bois’s denunciation “personally,” McKay returned the rage, posting to his onetime idol in June 1928 one of his most blistering rebukes: “nowhere in your writings do you reveal any comprehension of esthetics and therefore you are not competent nor qualified to pass judgement upon any work of art.” McKay’s letter derides Du Bois for trying “to pass off propaganda as … art.”Footnote ⁴¹

Despite the critical scolding from Du Bois and other Black critics, McKay was not done with exploring the idea of same-sex attraction among identifiably heterosexual Black males. In his next novel and something of a sequel, the Marseille-set Banjo: A Story without a Plot (1929), Ray again plays second fiddle, this time to African American wandering jazz musician Banjo. Jake makes a cameo near the end of the novel, leaving behind Felice and child to recross the North Atlantic in search of his Ray, and when they reunite in a Vieux Port bar, Ray greets his friend with a “French-kiss.”Footnote ⁴² Says Ray: “‘That’s all right, Jakie, he-men and all. Stay long enough in any country and you’ll get on to the ways and find them natural.’”Footnote ⁴³ With Banjo, McKay shifts the cosmopolitan theme from Harlem to France’s major port city, portraying the Vieux Port as a significant Black Diaspora hub. Whereas Home to Harlem could claim to be the first major success by a Black author, Banjo was a financial disappointment. The American reading public that McKay all but created for his revolutionary Harlem narrative was not there for his Black Atlantic cruise.

While Banjo failed to sell to McKay’s targeted public during the early 1930s, it attracted to his surprise and delight a modest if historic French readership.Footnote ⁴⁴ As the Négritude movement flourished in the 1930s, Paris publisher Éditions Rieder issued a translation of Banjo and in due course Home to Harlem and his final novel, Banana Bottom.Footnote ⁴⁵ McKay’s revered reputation among Black intellectuals located in Paris is exemplified by Négritude authors Aimé Césaire, Léon Damas, and Léopold Sedar Senghor stating that they had committed to memory entire passages of Banjo. Footnote ⁴⁶ McKay’s French was rudimentary, but the Jamaican émigré nevertheless considered himself a Francophile, his aesthetic and artistic discernment shaped significantly by French literary culture. New Negro notables like Hughes, Locke, and Countee Cullen also claimed Paris, specifically, the neighborhood of (“Black”) Montmartre, as a kind of home away from Harlem, but as McKay wrote two Pan-Africanist novels set in Marseille, his art is perhaps the best example of Black literary transnationalism in the New Negro period. McKay’s dissemination among French readers was limited, however, and a wider reading public in France would not materialize until long after his death.Footnote ⁴⁷

Despite McKay’s fondness for Gallic culture, he decided to withdraw from France in the late 1920s, probably motivated by an unexpected police investigation.Footnote ⁴⁸ McKay evidently avoided state interest for the first few years in France but was eventually accused—ironically, considering his critique of Du Bois—of being a radical “propagandist,” which became a factor in his sojourns in Spain and eventually his settlement in Morocco.Footnote ⁴⁹ Living in Tangier, he published two more books, starting with the short story collection, Gingertown.Footnote ⁵⁰ The contents resemble a kind of Black Diaspora map, with stories set in Jamaica, New York, and France, focusing on a variety of Black characters. The book’s exceptional character led to the unusual text’s failure in the marketplace, as his publisher, Eugene Saxton, was somewhat understandably unsure of how to vend it.Footnote ⁵¹ The last novel McKay published, the 1933 Banana Bottom, also written in Morocco, is set in the rural part of Jamaica where he spent his youth and again pursues the Black transnational theme. Bita Plant is sent to England and then returns to the island as an educated woman and potentially something of an outsider among the Banana Bottom community. McKay’s novel of rural Jamaica also did not have a ready public. An October 20, 1933 letter to Max Eastman spells out the situation:

How McKay saw his work as aimed at American readership is reinforced periodically in correspondence posted during the 1920s and early 1930s. In a December 7, 1929 letter to Max Eastman, McKay laments missing the chance to meet with his old friend in Paris and comments on how he saw his identity as a writer vis-à-vis an established publishing scene: “I am sure a talk with you would have done me lots and lots of good. I’ll have to wait until I come ‘home’ next year.”Footnote ⁵³ Caribbean émigré McKay repeats the gesture of placing home in quotation marks in the same letter, and wrapping the word in quotes would recur in several later letters.Footnote ⁵⁴ At the height of the Great Depression, McKay was eager to end his exile and return to the United States, referring to his “homecoming” in a January 27, 1933 letter to Eastman.

As the titles of Home to Harlem and McKay’s 1937 memoir A Long Way from Home suggest, home is a layered theme in his writing. Considering McKay spent virtually his entire writing career as an exile, the quotation marks signifying America as his acknowledged home make a deeply paradoxical figure. McKay’s fiction calls attention to the paradox, as McKay’s alter ego in two novels, the Caribbean refugee Ray, has fled US-occupied Haiti for, a surreal and brutal irony, America. McKay’s reference to the United States as home in scare quotes articulates the idea that while America oppresses him, as in the sonnet “America,” the United States was his targeted reading public, even while the author was being targeted as a threat and, at the time of writing the letter, being denied the privilege of returning to the United States.

No doubt the abrupt arrival of the Great Depression and the bottom falling out of publishing books played a role in McKay’s setbacks during the early 1930s, as it did for other New Negro writers. But it appears that in McKay’s case, the cause was not primarily the summary death of the “Negro Vogue,” as Hughes mordantly communicates the circumstances in his first memoir, The Big Sea (1940).Footnote ⁵⁵ McKay after all was able to continue to publish, and his publisher did try to market his books to a general US reading public.

While all three texts shared the common misfortune of not selling well, McKay did not begin writing Gingertown and Banana Bottom immediately after publishing Banjo. Despite Banjo’s disappointing reception, McKay began to work on another novel set in Marseille, ultimately titled Romance in Marseille. Footnote ⁵⁶ The author reasoned that with Romance in Marseille he could accomplish with American readers what Banjo failed to achieve. McKay’s protagonist was a disabled West African named Lafala, based on a Nigerian friend who had been fictionalized as a supporting character in Banjo named Taloufa. Like Banjo, the cast is chiefly a motley of Pan-African émigrés, several of whom scrounge their way without legal immigrant status. Martinican Communist Party labor organizer Étienne St. Dominique is a fictional version of another Marseille friend, Senegalese activist Lamine Senghor.Footnote ⁵⁷ Unlike Home to Harlem’s outré pansies and dandies effectively serving as a Jazz Age sexual revolution tableau, Romance in Marseille’s queer characters are portrayed as living three-dimensional lives and play pivotal roles in the plot. Eventually unsure of whether he could pull off a novel about a protagonist who becomes a double amputee, however, the author set the manuscript aside in the early 1930s to write Gingertown and Banana Bottom. When the two books did not sell, McKay, though still feeling tentative about the project, resumed writing Romance in Marseille.

Indigent and ill, McKay hoped he could produce a book that would realize a profit, a product that would appeal to the US marketplace, which is why, unlike Banjo: A Story without a Plot, McKay gave Romance in Marseille a plot. The Marseille gendarmerie scheme with the shipping line against Lafala, and rival characters conspire against one another. McKay’s difficulties with the Tangier authorities may have inspired the novel’s overlapping machinations: the French colonial police in league with the British consulate, that is, accusing him of being a subversive. Again, however, McKay underestimated the potential to imagine and shape a public for his writing. Because Romance in Marseille simply seemed to reiterate Banjo and somewhat due to its frank representation of homosexuality, the émigré author ended up losing his publisher, Harper and Brothers, and failing to find another, he shelved it in 1933. With the help of influential civil rights activists led by James Weldon Johnson, McKay was able to return to the United States in 1934.Footnote ⁵⁸

McKay’s mid- to late Great Depression years in Harlem were characterized by persistent infirmity, hardship, and increasing disappointment as a writer. He resumed writing poetry, resulting in “The Cities” verse, a collection that also failed to find a publisher.Footnote ⁵⁹ Several years later, he published A Long Way from Home, a rousing memoir he hoped would put him back on the map of the competitive Manhattan publishing world. It seems likely that the lively, gossipy book that covered McKay’s travels and sojourns from New York to London, Moscow, Berlin, Paris, Marseille, Barcelona, and various locations in Morocco, highlighting Tangier, would have done well except that his new publisher, Lee Furman, went bust soon after the book’s release, which meant that the project benefited from virtually no marketing campaign—a terminal case for any book intended to compete in the marketplace.Footnote ⁶⁰ In the late 1930s, he returned to fiction with Harlem Glory, a novel about a weary Black protagonist who returns to New York from abroad and encounters a distressingly altered Harlem of internal Black antagonism (apparently abandoned, Harlem Glory remained unfinished when it was published in 1990).Footnote ⁶¹

At the same time, McKay’s problems with the state resumed during the Little Red Scare period of the late 1930s when he was called before Martin Dies’s House Special Committee on Un-American Activities. McKay cooperated, and his writing signaled his turn against internationalist leftism. The WPA-supported collection of essays Harlem: Negro Metropolis reflected McKay’s disenchantment with the Left’s effect on the Black population.Footnote ⁶² Shifting away from leftist politics did not help bring him closer to the public he desired, however, as Harlem: Negro Metropolis, the last book he published in his lifetime, fared no better than previous efforts.

McKay’s last novel, the circa 1941 Amiable with Big Teeth: A Novel of the Love Affair Between the Communists and the Poor Black Sheep of Harlem, also was not published in his lifetime.Footnote ⁶³ As its sardonic subtitle suggests, Amiable with Big Teeth is an incensed satire about the white-run CPUSA manipulating Black intellectuals and the Harlem masses. The novel puts into fictional form Harlem: Negro Metropolis’s anxiety over the forfeiture of Black autonomy, a vivid volte-face from McKay’s early 1920s conviction, expressed to Garvey, that the white-run Communist Party could be trusted to aid the struggling Black masses. It also marks a reversal with respect to his unique vision of a transnational America. Also a novel with a plot, Amiable with Big Teeth relates the elaborate story of two competing Harlem organizations during the Second Italo-Ethiopian War: the Black-operated Hands to Ethiopia and the CPUSA-sponsored White Friends of Ethiopia, led by an iniquitous, shadowy communist agent, a character that foresees Cold War-period Hollywood melodrama. McKay’s final novel would have made a significant complement to the emergent Black satire during the interwar and Second World War periods, alongside such works as George S. Schuyler’s similarly rowdy Black Empire, an early Afrofuturist caper narrative about a Black Fu Manchu-like character who plots to seize Africa from European imperialism, serialized from 1936 to 1938 in the Pittsburgh Courier. Footnote ⁶⁴

In the mid-1940s, a finally down-and-out McKay converted to Catholicism and, envisioning Catholic readers as his final public, wrote his last attempts at verse, a sonnet series he called “The Cycle.” As McKay himself acknowledged, his skills were diminished and the quality of the poetry was wanting, with only a few published in his lifetime, mostly in the Catholic Worker. Footnote ⁶⁵ He also began to work on another memoir, focusing on his Clarendon youth, My Green Hills of Jamaica (also published posthumously, in 1979).Footnote ⁶⁶ In 1948, after many years of privation and obscurity, he died in Chicago of myocardial infarction at 57. Buried in York City, Claude McKay’s modest flush marker is mustered among the millions in Queens’s vast Calvary Cemetery.Footnote ⁶⁷