Books by Claude McKay

"Ritorno ad Harlem" non è solo un romanzo: è una vera e propria celebrazione, un ballo cadenzato dalle note di quello sfrenato jazz che ha cristallizzato per sempre, nell’immaginario di tutti, i "ruggenti anni Venti". Ma qui non parliamo di Gershwin, né, tantomeno, del Grande Gatsby. Il mondo da cui muove Claude McKay è infatti quello della New York afroamericana, di una Harlem che, successivamente ai disagi della Grande Guerra, ha attirato migliaia di neri dal sud degli Stati Uniti e da altre zone dell’America, tutti con l’obiettivo di dare vita a una scenografia per le proprie speranze di emancipazione. Il cosiddetto Rinascimento di Harlem è un’epopea vitale, sanguigna, perennemente sospesa fra la disperazione della miseria e il vitalismo di una comunità che cerca di costruirsi un proprio spazio di libertà. Una lettura imprescindibile, per tutti e a ogni latitudine. Claude McKay (1889-1948) nasce a James Hill, nel sudest della Jamaica, da una famiglia di contadini proprietari di terra. Avviato agli studi da un fratello, manifesta sin da giovanissimo una forte vena letteraria, pubblicando il suo primo libro di poesie, "Songs of Jamaica", nel 1912 (un originale esperimento in lingua patois). Nonostante i moltissimi viaggi e una vita fatta di avventure e lavori di ogni tipo (visiterà l’Unione Sovietica, si sposerà in Giappone e abiterà a Londra), il suo nome è per lo più associato al cosiddetto Rinascimento di Harlem. Trasferitosi in America nel 1912, infatti, entrerà ben presto in contatto con la frenetica scena creativa del più grande quartiere nero di New York. "Ritorno ad Harlem" (1928), sicuramente la sua opera più famosa, è una celebrazione della vita di strada e, al contempo, una denuncia della profonda iniquità della società americana. Fra i suoi altri libri, si possono anche citare "Banjo" (1929) e "Banana Bottom" (1933).

Harlem Shadows (1922) is a poetry collection by Claude McKay. Published at the height of the Harlem Renaissance, Harlem Shadows earned praise from legendary poet and political activist Max Eastman for its depictions of urban life and the technical mastery of its author. As a committed leftist, McKay¿who grew up in Jamaicäcaptures the life of Harlem from a realist¿s point of view, lamenting the poverty of its African American community while celebrating their resilience and cultural achievement. In ¿The White City,¿ McKay observes New York, its ¿poles and spires and towers vapor-kissed¿ and ¿fortressed port through which the great ships pass.¿ Filled him with a hatred of the inhuman scene of industry and power, forced to ¿muse [his] life-long hate,¿ he observes the transformative quality of focused anger: ¿My being would be a skeleton, a shell, / If this dark Passion that fills my every mood, / And makes my heaven in the white world¿s hell, / Did not forever feed me vital blood.¿ Rather than fall into despair, he channels his hatred into a revolutionary spirit, allowing him to stand tall within ¿the mighty city.¿ In ¿The Tropics in New York,¿ he walks past a window filled with ¿Bananas ripe and green, and ginger-root, / Cocoa in pods and alligator pears,¿ a feast of fresh tropical fruit that brings him back, however briefly, to his island home of Jamaica. Recording his nostalgic response, McKay captures his personal experience as an immigrant in America: ¿My eyes grew dim, and I could no more gaze; / A wave of longing through my body swept, / And, hungry for the old, familiar ways, / I turned aside and bowed my head and wept.¿ With a beautifully designed cover and professionally typeset manuscript, this edition of Claude McKay¿s Harlem Shadows is a classic of Jamaican literature reimagined for modern readers.

VINTAGE CLASSICS' HARLEM RENAISSANCE SERIES Celebrating the finest works of the Harlem Renaissance, one of the most important Black arts movements in modern history.'Why did I want to mix mahself up in a white folk's war? It ain't ever was any of black folks' affair'When Jake Brown joins the army during the First World War, he is treated more like a slave than a soldier. After deserting his post to escape the racial violence he is facing, Jake travels back home to Harlem. But despite the distance, Jake cannot seem to escape the past and the explosive ways in which it can culminate. Written with brutal accuracy, Home to Harlem is an extraordinary work, and was the first American bestseller by a Black writer. 'One of the most gifted writers of the Harlem Renaissance' Washington Post

Spring in New Hampshire and Other Poems (1920) is a poetry collection by Claude McKay. Published toward the beginning of the Harlem Renaissance, Spring in New Hampshire and Other Poems is the first of McKay¿s collections to appear in the United States. As a committed leftist, McKay¿who grew up in Jamaicäcaptures the life of African Americans from a realist¿s point of view, lamenting their exposure to poverty, racism, and violence while celebrating their resilience and cultural achievement. Several years before T. S. Eliot¿s The Waste Land (1922) and William Carlos Williams¿ Spring and All (1923), modernist poet Claude McKay troubles the traditional symbol of springtime to accommodate the hardships of an increasingly industrialized world. In ¿Spring in New Hampshire,¿ the poet gives voice to a desperate laborer, for whom the beauty and harmony of the season of rebirth are not only sickening, but altogether inaccessible: ¿Too green the springing April grass, / Too blue the silver-speckled sky, / For me to linger here, alas, / While happy winds go laughing by, / Wasting the golden hours indoors, / Washing windows and scrubbing floors.¿ A master of traditional forms, McKay brings his experience as a black man to bear on a poem otherwise dedicated to descriptions of natural beauty, challenging the very tradition his language and style invoke. In ¿The Lynching,¿ he calls on the reader to witness the brutality of American racism while exposing the complicity of those who would look without feeling: ¿[S]oon the mixed crowds came to view / The ghastly body swaying in the sun: / The women thronged to look, but never a one / Showed sorrow in her eyes of steely blue¿¿ As children dance around the victim¿s body, ¿lynchers that were to be,¿ McKay raises a terrible, timeless question: how long will such violence endure? With a beautifully designed cover and professionally typeset manuscript, this edition of Claude McKay¿s Spring in New Hampshire and Other Poems is a classic of Jamaican literature reimagined for modern readers.

The pioneering novel of physical disability, transatlantic travel, and black international politics. A vital document of black modernism and one of the earliest overtly queer fictions in the African American tradition. Published for the first time.A Penguin ClassicA New York Times Book Review Editors' Choice/Staff PickBuried in the archive for almost ninety years, Claude McKay's Romance in Marseille traces the adventures of a rowdy troupe of dockworkers, prostitutes, and political organizers--collectively straight and queer, disabled and able-bodied, African, European, Caribbean, and American. Set largely in the culture-blending Vieux Port of Marseille at the height of the Jazz Age, the novel takes flight along with Lafala, an acutely disabled but abruptly wealthy West African sailor. While stowing away on a transatlantic freighter, Lafala is discovered and locked in a frigid closet. Badly frostbitten by the time the boat docks, the once-nimble dancer loses both of his lower legs, emerging from life-saving surgery as what he terms "an amputated man." Thanks to an improbably successful lawsuit against the shipping line, however, Lafala scores big in the litigious United States. Feeling flush after his legal payout, Lafala doubles back to Marseille and resumes his trans-African affair with Aslima, a Moroccan courtesan. With its scenes of black bodies fighting for pleasure and liberty even when stolen, shipped, and sold for parts, McKay's novel explores the heritage of slavery amid an unforgiving modern economy. This first-ever edition of Romance in Marseille includes an introduction by McKay scholars Gary Edward Holcomb and William J. Maxwell that places the novel within both the "stowaway era" of black cultural politics and McKay's challenging career as a star and skeptic of the Harlem Renaissance.

The complete works of previously unpublished and published poetry of a pioneer of modern black writing