Claude McKay

Claude McKay

Festus Claudius "Claude" McKay (born September 15, 1889 in Sunny Ville , Clarendon , Jamaica , † May 22, 1948 in Chicago , USA ) was a Jamaican poet and novelist. He was one of the earliest exponents of the Harlem Renaissance .

Life

McKay was the youngest child in a large family, his father a relatively wealthy landowner, an exception among the dark-skinned colored people, of whom few like McKay's father had enough to vote. The family placed an emphasis on education and Claude McKay's literary ambitions were also supported by Walter Jekyll, an English settler. He helped publish a first volume of poetry, Songs of Jamaica (1912). These fifty poems were also the first to be printed in Jamaican patois , the language of the island's poor people. McKays Constab Ballads from the same year shared experience as a police officer.

In 1912 he left the island to visit the Tuskegee Institute Booker T. Washington in Charleston, South Carolina . He later moved to Kansas State College , where he became involved in politics for the first time. In 1914 he broke off his studies. He moved to New York , Harlem and opened a restaurant and married his childhood sweetheart Eulalie Imelda Lewars. The marriage and business failed, and his wife returned to Jamaica. McKay was able to publish the poems The Harlem Dancer and Invocation in 1917 . He became aware of Frank Harris , the editor of the American edition of Pearson's Magazine, and Max Eastman of The Liberator . Pearson's published five of his poems in 1918, the Liberator in 1919 first The Dominant White and later seven more poems. Despite their sonnet form, his militant poems such as If We Must Die (1919) were recognized by leading poets of the Harlem Renaissance, such as Langston Hughes and Countee Cullen .

From 1919-20 he lived in London, read Karl Marx and soon worked for the socialist newspaper Workers' Dreadnought by Sylvia Pankhurst . He met Francine Budgen. The first version of the collection of poems Spring in New Hampshire was published (1920). In 1922 a more detailed edition appeared in the USA and also his most important volume of poetry, Harlem Shadows . 1921-22 he was one of the editors of the Liberator . In November 1922 he gave a speech at the Fourth Congress of the Third International in Moscow . He spoke to Leon Trotsky and got to know Nikolai Bukharin and Karl Radek . He stayed in Russia for another six months. The essays The Negroes in America (1923) and the propaganda short stories Trial by Lynching (1925) were published in the Soviet Union . In May he traveled via Hamburg to Berlin, where he and Marsden Hartley visited Georg Grosz . He met the authors Pierre Loving and Josephine Herbst and got to know the philosopher of the Harlem Renaissance, Alain Locke . McKay moved on to Paris in October, and in the spring of 1924 he lived in the south, in La Ciott and Toulon , thanks to the help of Louise Bryant .

In 1925 he completed his first novel, Color Scheme , which could not be published. 1926-27 he lived in Marseille. His novel Home to Harlem was published by Harper in New York in 1928 and became a bestseller. From 1930 to the end of 1933 he lived in Morocco . In early 1934 he returned to New York.

His autobiography A Long Way from Home was published in 1937; a second volume, My Green Hills of Jamaica, was not published until 1979. Harlem: Negro Metropolis came out in 1940 without being noticed. In the same year he became an American. In 1944 he converted to the Roman Catholic profession. He moved to Chicago and died there of heart failure in 1948.

His best known novel is Home To Harlem (1928) which won the Harmon Gold Award for Literature . Banjo: A Story without a Plot (1929) and Banana Bottom (1933), the Gingertown short story collection (1932), and the autobiographical works Long Way from Home (1937) and Negro Metropolis (1940) followed later . The main topic is the life of the poor people in Jamaica and New York, as well as their own experiences with discrimination and poverty.

Works

Translation in German:

• Hanna Meuter : "I sing America too". American Negro seals. Bilingual. Ed. And transl. Together with Paul Therstappen . Wolfgang Jess, Dresden 1932. With short biographies. (Series: The New Negro. The Voice of the Awakening Afro-America , Volume 1.) New edition, ibid. 1959, pp. 72-75 (poem: "Negro Dancers") and introduction.

literature

• Wayne F. Cooper: Claude McKay: Rebel Sojourner in the Harlem Renaissance: A Biography . Louisiana State University Press, 1987. Revised Ph.D. Dissertation at Rutgers University, New Brunswick.

Web links

• Literature by and about Claude McKay in the catalog of the German National Library
• The White House - PROLETKULT