Home to Harlem

Claude McKay’s most well-known Harlem Renaissance novel now in Penguin Classics

A Penguin Classic

Claude McKay’s first novel, Home to Harlem, was published in 1928 during the height of the Harlem Renaissance. McKay portrays Harlem post-WWI through two Black migrants to New York: Jake, a Southern-born African American longshoreman who deserts the U.S. army and returns to his home in Harlem; and Ray, an educated Haitian immigrant. With his innovative use of Black dialects, McKay portrays a complex world of Black people, both native-born and immigrant, who navigate a dynamic society in the midst of radical change. Harlem is portrayed as a cauldron of Black life where Black people experience both White racism and intra-Black prejudice as well as sexual freedom and pleasure, all through the prism of Harlem’s jazz nightlife. Home to Harlem sparked controversy among Black critics. W.E.B. Du Bois considered it reductive and stereotypical while Marcus Garvey accused McKay of pandering to racist white tastes for degrading depictions of Blacks. Other critics such as Langston Hughes embraced Home to Harlem for its frank depictions of modern Black working class life and its meditation on enduring social inequalities. This debate within the Harlem’s intellectual community, combined with the curiosity of white readers to learn more about this modern Black space, drove Home to Harlem to become the first commercial bestseller by a Black novelist in the United States.

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 United States 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. In 2009, his lost manuscript for the 1930s novel Amiable with Big Teeth was discovered among the archived papers of Samuel Roth at Columbia University, and was published for the first time in 2017 by Penguin Classics. Romance in Marseille was published in 2020 by Penguin Classics. Belinda Edmondson is Distinguished Professor in the departments of English and Africana studies at Rutgers University-Newark. She is the winner of MLA’s first annual Aldo and Jeanne Scaglione Prize for African Studies in 2023. She is the author of several books on Caribbean literature and has won numerous grants and fellowships for her research.