author portrait
© Carl Van Vechten/Beinecke Lib.

Claude McKay

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 U.S. 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.
 
Brent Hayes Edwards is a professor in the Department of English and Comparative Literature at Columbia University. His books include The Practice of Diaspora: Literature, Translation, and the Rise of Black Internationalism and Epistrophies: Jazz and the Literary Imagination
 
Jean-Christophe Cloutier is an assistant professor of English at the University of Pennsylvania. He is the editor of Jack Kerouac’s original French writings, La vie est d’hommage (2016), and translator of Kerouac’s two French novellas in The Unknown Kerouac: Rare, Unpublished & Newly Translated Writings (2016), and his essay on the first collaboration between Ralph Ellison and Gordon Parks appears in Invisible Man: Gordon Parks and Ralph Ellison in Harlem (2016).

Books

A Monthly Update from Penguin Classics

Because what you read matters. Subscribe to the Penguin Classics Newsletter here. Black Lives Matter. Black Voices Matter. Black Stories Matter. This month we’re sharing a few of the works by Black authors we have been learning from lately. Let us know on social media the Black voices and stories you’re reading this month (we’re @PenguinClassics everywhere). Nonfiction—History: The

Read more

Penguin Presents Classics in African American Literature

Because what you read matters. Subscribe to the Penguin Classics Newsletter here. For more than seventy years, Penguin has been the leading publisher of classic literature in the English-speaking world. With more than 1,800 titles, Penguin Classics represents a global bookshelf of the best works throughout history and across genres and disciplines. Presented here are some

Read more