Claude McKay
A Black Poet's Struggle for Identity
University of Massachusetts Press
The 1920s witnessed an extraordinary flowering of literary and artistic creativity among African Americans. Critics hailed the emergence of a "New Negro," who took pride in the black race and its African heritage, and whose writings exposed and attacked discrimination, explored black folk culture, and strove to create a unique African-American literature. Yet for all its vitality, the cultural movement best known as the Harlem Renaissance was fraught with tensions: between the ideal of Africa and the reality of America; between the lure of a romanticized rural past and the demands of an alien urban present; between the need to affirm the uniqueness of black culture and the desire to achieve acceptance by the majority white culture. Perhaps more than any other Harlem Renaissance figure, Claude McKay embodied these contradictory impulses.
The paradox of Claude McKay cannot be reduced to any simple formula. He was at once an enfant terrible who took pride in the Negro's cultural heritage and an intellectual who strove for acceptance in predominantly white circles. He was a radical intent on transforming his adopted county who nevertheless left the United States temporarily for the Soviet Union. Yet these tensions, as this book strives to show, cannot simply be ascribed to personal or psychological problems; ultimately, they were rooted in the ambiguous social and cultural position of the black artist and political radical of the early twentieth century.
The paradox of Claude McKay cannot be reduced to any simple formula. He was at once an enfant terrible who took pride in the Negro's cultural heritage and an intellectual who strove for acceptance in predominantly white circles. He was a radical intent on transforming his adopted county who nevertheless left the United States temporarily for the Soviet Union. Yet these tensions, as this book strives to show, cannot simply be ascribed to personal or psychological problems; ultimately, they were rooted in the ambiguous social and cultural position of the black artist and political radical of the early twentieth century.
Immensely readable and laden with information, the text makes a watershed period in African American literary history accessible for new students or critics of black literature and life.'—American Literature
'Essential reading for anyone interested in the Harlem Renaissance or the history of twentieth-century American racial and leftist politics.'—American Historical Review
'As much a study of self-defeat as of struggle for survival, this is a well-documented and cautious biography of a tough, angry, and mercurial Jamaican writer during the interwar years in America. It reveals as much about the complexity and alienation of New York intellectuals and creative artists in general as it does about McKay and the black writers he ultimately chose not to be identified with.'—Kirkus Reviews
'McKay's later renunciation of communism and his conversion to Catholicism, his battle with syphilis and his death in Chicago of heart failure are detailed with sensitivity in this comprehensive critical biography.'—Publishers Weekly
'Tillery provides evenhanded psychological insights into the poet's life while examining the larger problems that confronted most black intellectuals during the 1920s and 1930s. Tillery's work is an honest look at both interracial and intraracial relationships. His effort looms as definitive and attempts to make sense of the 'ambiguous social and cultural position of the black artist . . . of the early twentieth century.''—Booklist
Tyrone Tillery is a member of the history department at the University of Houston.
