Home to Harlem

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Claude McKay’s most well-known Harlem Renaissance novel now in Penguin Classics

A Penguin Classic

Claude McKay’s first novel, Home to Harlem, was published in 1928 during the height of the Harlem Renaissance. McKay portrays Harlem post-WWI, through Jake, an African American longshoreman who deserts the U.S. army and returns to his home in Harlem, and Ray, a Haitian intellectual expatriate. With his use of dialect, McKay portrays these men and other working-class characters who try to stay afloat in a complex world of isolation, racial discrimination, and excitement drawn from Harlem’s jazz nightlife. Home to Harlem sparked controversy among Black middle-class critics, such as W.E.B. Du Bois, who considered it reductive and stereotypical, while other critics such as Langston Hughes embraced it for its frankness and for the relevance of McKay’s reflections on the Black working-class experience and the social and racial inequalities of the day. This debate within the Harlem Renaissance literary world and curiosity about Harlem from white readers drove Home to Harlem to become the first commercial bestseller by an African American novelist.Claude McKay (1889-1948), born Festus Claudius McKay, is widely regarded as one of the most important literary and political writers of the interwar period and the Harlem Renaissance. Born in Jamaica, he moved to the United States in 1912 to study at the Tuskegee Institute. In 1928, he published his most famous novel, Home to Harlem, which won the Harmon Gold Award for Literature. He also published two other novels Banjo and Banana Bottom, as well as a collection of short stories, Gingertown, two autobiographical books, A Long Way from Home and My Green Hills of Jamaica, and a work of nonfiction, Harlem: Negro Metropolis. His Selected Poems was published posthumously, and in 1977 he was named the national poet of Jamaica. In 2009, his lost manuscript for the 1930s novel Amiable with Big Teeth was discovered among the archived papers of Samuel Roth at Columbia University, and was published for the first time in 2017 by Penguin Classics. Romance in Marseille was published in 2020 by Penguin Classics. Belinda Edmondson is Distinguished Professor in the departments of English and Africana studies at Rutgers University-Newark. She is the winner of MLA’s first annual Aldo and Jeanne Scaglione Prize for African Studies in 2023. She is the author of several books on Caribbean literature and has won numerous grants and fellowships for her research.US

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