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Claude Mckay doesn’t support the American Dream. Through his work he exposed systematic racial discrimination that was prevalent across the nation which denied African American’s a chance at achieving the American Dream, and basic civil liberties. In his literature he expressed how coming from a poverty stricken nation like Jamaica,  America was a nation where dreams could be achieved but not in the case of African Americans.

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Mckay addresses America’s white oppressors, their inability to adjust discriminatory processes, and provides a realistic insight on how life is for African Americans in the poem “America”.  Analyst Jean Wagner wrote this excerpt about poem “America” “What is predominant here, and basic also, is his love for America, whose strength acts on the poet like a stimulant. "Stealing my breath of life, I will confess, I love this cultured hell that tests my youth!” The other half of the picture, the hatred that America has for blacks.”(Gale In Context) Essentially, in Mckay’s writing he expresses his love for America, and the hatred he receives in return. Mckay believes that the American Dream is not attainable for African Americans due to the discriminatory practices prevalent across the nation.

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"Claude McKay," in Black Poets of the United States: From Paul Laurence Dunbar to Langston Hughes, translated by Kenneth Douglas, University of Illinois Press, 1973, pp. 197-257. [In the following excerpt from Black Poets of the United States, Wagner presents an extensive overview of McKay's poetry, focusing on stylistic and thematic devices.]

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Source 2: Claude McKay, in Dictionary of Literary Biography, Volume 4: American Writers in Paris

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Source 2: Claude McKay, in Dictionary of Literary Biography, Volume 4: American Writers in Paris

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Claude Mckay’s experience of racial discrimination internationally created a false hope for the American Dream, which was quickly disproved as racial discrimination was as prevalent in America as a nation. He wrote in "American Writers In Paris" that, “This strong sense of color-induced alienation seems to have characterized much of McKay's relationship to the Paris literary community” (Gale In Context) Mckay found that racial discrimination was prevalent across several nations, and he found a way to acknowledge these experiences through literature.

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About Gale In Context: High School Explore thousands of topics across subjects including literature, science, history, and social issues using different sources. Don't know how to login? Depending on this location's preferences, the log-in process could include your library card number, a student or user ID, or another provided password.

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Source 3: Claude Mckay: Rebel Sojourner In Harlem Renaissance

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Source 3: Claude Mckay: Rebel Sojourner In Harlem Renaissance

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Claude Mckay became one of the most influential figures during the Harlem Renaissance, with his literature examining how America was a place of discrimination and did not offer equal opportunities to African Americans. “McKay's poem "If We Must Die," prompted by a spate of racially motivated riots in the summer of 1919, was widely quoted in African American journals and newspapers and set the tone for the emergence of a New African American, who was ready to openly defy racism and discrimination." (Gale In Context) Mckay was one of the first people to speak out and address the racial discrimination in America, in doing so he caught the eye of the public and quickly became one of the most well known African American figures.

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Wayne F. Cooper. Baton Rouge: Louisina State UP, 1987. xi + 441 pp. ISBN 0-8071-2074. $16.95 paper.

Claude McKay is generally regarded as a major figure of the Harlem Renaissance as well as one of the most controversial. Born in Jamaica in 1889, he came to the United States in 1912, after having published two volumes of poetry written in Jamaican dialect. After a short stay at the Tuskegee Institute, he eventually found his way to New York, where he became part of that flowering of black literature and art in the 1920s that has since been called the Harlem Renaissance. At the same time, he was involved in white radical circles in Greenwich Village. McKay was absent from Harlem for most of the '20s, however, spending time in England, Soviet Russia, France, and northern Africa before returning to the United States in 1934. He died in Chicago in poverty and obscurity in 1948.

McKay's poem "If We Must Die," prompted by a spate of racially motivated riots in the summer of 1919, was widely quoted in African American journals and newspapers and set the tone for the emergence of a New Negro, who was ready to openly defy racism and discrimination. His first novel, Home to Harlem (1928), became one of the few bestsellers of the period, but was criticized by some members of the Harlem intelligentsia for portraying life in Harlem in a negative light. The most well-known review was probably that of W. E. B. Du Bois, who exclaimed that after reading McKay's novel, he felt "distinctly like taking a bath." McKay's second novel Banjo (1929), a loosely constructed work set in Marseilles, and depicting the lives of itinerant blacks from the American South, the Caribbean, and Africa, was a major influence on francophone black writers of the 1930s, including Aime Cesaire and Leopold Senghor. Senghor went so far as to say that McKay was "the true inventor of negritude." His third novel, Banana Bottom (1933), set in the post-Emancipation period in Jamaica, led Edward Kamau Brathwaite to declare in A History of the Voice (1984), "Our native literature begins with McKay in exile."

As the above brief survey of the impact of some of McKay's literary work suggests, his influence extends beyond the Harlem Renaissance. In many respects, he can be characterized as a precursor of a diasporic perspective of African American culture promoted by contemporary scholars such as Paul Gilroy. Yet, surprisingly, compared with other figures of the Harlem Renaissance such as Langston Hughes (one only has to think of Arnold Rampersad's two-volume biography and the recent publication of his collected short stories), Jean Toomer (whose Cane has appeared in a Norton Critical Edition and is used in many college classrooms, and whose work has been the subject of several critical studies), and, most recently, Zora Neale Hurston (the critical heritage of which has, since Alice Walker's "rediscovery" of her work, become somewhat of a cottage industry), McKay has received relatively little critical attention. Apart from the book under review and the recent disappointing study by Tyrone Tillery, Claude McKay: A Black Poet's Struggle for Identity (Amherst: U of Massachusetts P, 1992), the only other book-length study of McKay is James Giles's Claude McKay (New York Twayne, 1976), published in the Twayne Literary Biography series. Of these three biographies, Cooper's is by far the most comprehensive and useful. He has incorporated all the relevant archival material on McKay, and had access to unpublished correspondence in the possession of McKay's recently deceased daughter, Hope McKay Virtue.

First published in 1987, Cooper's biography has just been re-issued in paperback without alteration. In this short preface, Cooper states that he attempted two things in writing the biography to make clear McKay's significance for black literature, not only in the US, but in the Caribbean and Africa, and to portray "the man and the artist." Cooper goes on to say that "the first objective was more easily accomplished than the second" (vii). Furthermore, Cooper explains that since he has written a biography, not a work of literary analysis, his "central focus is McKay's life, not simply his literature," although in the same breath he assures us that he has devoted "a good deal of attention on McKay's literary works, because most of his adult life was concerned with their production, and they remain in fact the chief reason for his enduring importance" (ix). Later he again shifts gear and argues that "the ultimate focus of this work, however, is neither on McKay's character or on his literature alone," but rather "on his reaction to the great social forces that impinged upon him from birth." Because McKay in many respects can serve as a mirror for the currents and conflicts of his time, he, in Cooper's view, "deserves the historian's attention." That is the extent of Cooper's methodological observations. From this rather muddled statement of intent we get a biography that in some measure fulfills Cooper's stated aim of tracing McKay's life and intellectual development, but falls short of achieving his objective of assessing McKay's importance for black literature.

Cooper devotes the first two chapters of the biography to McKay's Jamaican background: his exposure to free-thought philosophy at the hands of his older brother U'Theo and to African folktales told by his father. He examines his relationship with the Englishman Walter Jekyll, who urged him to write verse in dialect, but concludes that although McKay had an "emotional loyalty to the Jamaican peasantry, his commitment to the dialect was not total because he could not adequately express through his dialect persona all those aspects of his own intellectual and literary experiences that he had assimilated as an educated colonial" (47). Cooper touches on McKay's intellectual and spiritual return to Jamaica in the 1930s and 1940s with his novel Banana Bottom, his collection of short stories, Gingertown (1932), some of which are set in Jamaica, and his memoir, My Green Hills of Jamaica published posthumously, which was intended as a prelude to the period he covered in his autobiography, A Long Way from Home. However, this later body of work receives scant attention from Cooper, in spite of his stated intention to secure McKay a place in Caribbean literature. In spite of the critique of Jamaican colonial society McKay offers in Banana Bottom, Cooper argues that he could only conceive of an "ideal Jamaica of childhood memory" (62) in his later work.

As a historian, Cooper is best when dealing with McKay's nonfiction work, his articles and essays for radical publications like Sylvia Pankhurst's The Workers' Dreadnought and The Liberator, which he for a time co edited with Mike Gold. He argues persuasively that McKay's involvement with radical political movements was not as peripheral as McKay would have it in A Long Way from Home However, Cooper does reinforce the view that McKay was a political gadfly, who for example used his minute in the spotlight at the 4th Comintern Congress in Moscow in 1923 to criticize the American Communist Party's attitude toward blacks. Part of the strength of his discussion of McKay's involvement with radical causes, however, is rooted in Cooper's tendency to emphasize McKay's political career to the detriment of his literary career. Discussions of McKay's novels are largely confined to plot summaries emphasizing the "dilemma" between intellect and instinct that McKay suffered with his protagonist Ray in Home to Harlem and Banjo, and to contemporary reviews. Likewise, Cooper's examination of McKay's poetry, from his dialect verse written in Jamaica to the sonnets and protest poetry of the 1920s, is cast in terms of the conflict between form and content (in a similar vein, James Giles called the chapter dealing with McKay's poetry in his biography "Form vs. Content"). Cary Nelson's examination of McKay's verse in Repression and Recovery: Modern American Poetry and the Politics of Cultural Memory 1910-1945 (Madison: U of Wisconsin P, 1989) dismisses this apparent dilemma by arguing that McKay was consciously trying to undermine traditional forms by infusing them with radical content. In this manner, the juxtaposition of radical content with traditional form contains the potential for dynamic change, shaking "those same forms loose from their connections to dominant culture."

Cooper's biography is likely to remain the definitive work on McKay for some time yet. Having said that, though, there is much valuable work that remains to be done on McKay: to reclaim him as an integral part of Caribbean literary tradition and to provide an in-depth critical examination of his work.

Source Citation

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Wayne F. Cooper. Baton Rouge: Louisina State UP, 1987. xi + 441 pp. ISBN 0-8071-2074. $16.95 paper. Claude McKay is generally regarded as a major figure of the Harlem Renaissance as well as one of the most controversial. Born in Jamaica in 1889, he came to the United States in 1912, after having published two volumes of poetry written in Jamaican dialect.

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