A Long Way From Home.pdf - Site de Thomas - Free

introduction
Claude McKay (1889–1948) was one of the most prolific and sophisticated
black writers of the first half of the twentieth century. In the July
1919 issue of the Liberator, the publication of McKay’s now most celebrated
poem, “If We Must Die,” catapulted him to fame within the
African American community. Then, the critical praise of his 1922 volume
of poetry, Harlem Shadows, anointed him the greatest living black
poet since Paul Laurence Dunbar. Soon thereafter, Alain Locke, the socalled
dean of the Harlem Renaissance, characterized McKay as a promising
“youth” of New Negro modernism. Alongside black writers such as
Jean Toomer, Countee Cullen, and Langston Hughes, McKay starred in
the groundbreaking collections of 1925 edited by Locke: the “Harlem:
Mecca of the New Negro” issue of The Survey Graphic, published in
March, and The New Negro: An Interpretation, the ever-canonical
expanded version released later that year in book form. It is no surprise,
then, that we tend to associate the Jamaican-born author of poetry, short
stories, novels, and nonfiction with the “New Negro” or Harlem Renaissance,
a movement of black art, culture, and intellectualism that spanned
the period from World War I to the Great Depression.
Certain facts complicate McKay’s association with the Harlem Renaissance,
however. First, he was literally absent from Harlem proper during
the movement. From 1919 to 1921 he toured London, and from 1923
to 1934 he traveled to parts of Soviet Russia, Berlin, Paris, Marseilles,
Barcelona, Tangier, and Morocco. Second, McKay’s iconoclastic approach
to literature and culture alienated him from the Harlem Renaissance.
Third, unlike the more apolitical members of the Harlem Renaissance,
he became a Marxist-informed radical. In the United States, he read and
contributed to political magazines. He did the same abroad and also
attended conferences on the Bolshevik Revolution and Communism. He
well deserves the label “rebel sojourner” of the Harlem Renaissance. 1
McKay’s 1937 autobiography, A Long Way from Home, illustrates the
complexity of his relationship to the Harlem Renaissance. Published in
his late forties, it was the first of several books he wrote in the last
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