Letters in Exile: Transnational Journeys of a Harlem Renaissance Writer

A collection of private correspondence from one of the Harlem Renaissance’s brightest and most radical voices

The Jamaican-born, queer author Claude McKay (1890-1948) was a central figure of the Harlem Renaissance. His 1919 poem ＂If We Must Die＂ expressed a revolutionary vision for militant Black protest art, while his novels, including Home to Harlem, Banjo, and Banana Bottom, described ordinary Black life in lyrical prose. Yet for all that McKay connected himself to Harlem, he was a restless world traveler who sought spiritual, artistic, and political sustenance in France, Spain, Moscow, and Morocco.

Brooks E. Hefner and Gary Edward Holcomb bring together two decades of McKay’s never-before-published dispatches from the road with correspondents including W. E. B. Du Bois, Langston Hughes, Alain Locke, Max Eastman, and Louise Bryant. With wit, wisdom, insight, and sometimes irascible temper, McKay describes how he endured harassment from British authorities in London and worked alongside Leon Trotsky and Alexander Kerensky in Bolshevik Moscow. He reflects on Paris’s Lost Generation, immerses himself in the Marseille dockers’ noir subculture, and observes French colonialism in Morocco. Providing a new perspective on a unique figure of American modernism, this collection reveals McKay gossiping, cajoling, and confiding as he engages in spirited debates and challenges the political and artistic questions of the day.

Claude McKay (1890-1948) was a luminary of the Harlem Renaissance and Black transnational, Black queer, and Black Marxist history. His books include the poetry collection Harlem Shadows and the novels Home to Harlem and Banjo. Brooks E. Hefner is professor of English at James Madison University. He is the author Word on the Streets: The American Language of Vernacular Modernism and Black Pulp: Genre Fiction in the Shadow of Jim Crow. He lives in Charlottesville, VA. Gary Edward Holcomb is professor of African American studies at Ohio University. He is the author of Claude McKay, Code Name Sasha: Queer Black Marxism and the Harlem Renaissance. He lives in Athens, OH.