Claude McKay

McKay grew up in rural Jamaica, the youngest of eleven children of a moderately prosperous farmer, and was already publishing dialect poetry celebrating Jamaican peasant life before he emigrated to the United States in 1912 to study agriculture, a course of study he abandoned within months for Harlem and radical politics instead.

He spent the 1920s restlessly abroad, in London, Moscow, Marseille, and Morocco, joining Communist Party congresses and befriending Bloomsbury radicals along the way, before Home to Harlem, his 1928 novel of a Black soldier drifting through Harlem's nightlife, became the first bestseller by a Black American author: a success W. E. B. Du Bois denounced as pandering to white readers' taste for vice.

McKay converted to Catholicism late in life and died in Chicago in 1948, having spent his final years largely estranged from the Harlem literary establishment his own novel had helped put on the map.