Claude McKay's Prominent Position in the Harlem Renaissance

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Claude McKay real name is Festus Claudius McKay was an important person in the Harlem Renaissance, a prominent literary movement of the 1920s. His poems are traditional in technique and on the sentimental side in subject and tone.1
McKay was born in Sunny Ville, Jamaica, in 1889. McKay was the son of a peasant farmer. He took pride and knew a lot about his African heritage. He was interested in English poetry dealing with literary. McKay’s brother, Uriah Theophilus and an Englishmen Walter Jekyll helped McKay study British masters. McKay studied the British masters including John Milton, Alexander Pope and the later Romantics and European philosophers such as well-known pessimist Arthur Schopenhauer, Jekyll had to translate from German into English. It was Jekyll who advised hopeful poet McKay to stop mimicking the English poets and begin producing poetry in Jamaican dialect.
At age seventeen McKay left from Sunny Ville to begin helping as a woodworker in Brown's Town. But he studied there for a short time before leaving to work as a constable in the Jamaican capital, Kingston. In Kingston he experienced constant racism for the first time in his life. His native Sunny Ville was popular by blacks, but in large white Kingston blacks were considered lower and capable of only menial tasks. McKay quickly grew disgusted with the city's society, and within one year he returned home to Sunny Ville.
During his brief stays in Brown's Town and Kingston McKay continued writing poetry, and once back in Sunny Ville, with Jekyll's encouragement, he published the Songs of Jamaica and Constab Ballads in London in 1912. In these two volumes McKay portrays opposing aspects of black life in Jamaica. Songs of Jamaica presents an a...

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...as an artist's model. His infection eventually needed to go to the hospital, but after recovering he resumed traveling, and for the next eleven years he toured Europe and portions of northern Africa. During this period he published three novels and a short story collection. The first novel, Home to Harlem, may be his most recognized title. Published in 1928, it concerns a black soldier, Jake, who quickly abandons his military duties and returns home to Harlem. Jake represents, the instinctual aspect of the individual, and his ability to remain true to his feelings enables him to find happiness with a former prostitute, Felice. Mixed with Jake's behavior is that of Ray, an aspiring writer burdened with despair. His sense of bleakness derives largely from his intelligent perspective, and it eventually gets him to leave alien, racist America for his homeland of Haiti.

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