Claude McKay: The Making of a Black Bolshevik

Racism and war propel a pathbreaking Caribbean American writer leftward in this probing biography. James (A Fierce Hatred of Injustice), a University of California Irvine history professor, recaps the early career of Claude McKay (1890–1948), a Jamaican-born writer and Harlem Renaissance luminary who was investigated as a subversive for his sonnet “If We Must Die,” which decried white violence in the 1919 American race riots (“Like men we’ll face the murderous, cowardly pack,/ Pressed to the wall, dying, but—fighting back!”). James traces McKay’s journey from his youthful Fabian socialism through his radicalization by the harsh racism he encountered in America and the carnage of WWI, and his embrace of the Bolshevik revolution (he visited Russia in 1922 and found “no vulgar wonderment and bounderish superiority over a Negro’s being a poet”) which he saw as the best hope for the oppressed. James grounds insightful analyses of McKay’s poetry in the socioeconomic tensions roiling colonial Jamaica, the intricate cross-currents of contemporary Black nationalist and Marxist politics, and the writer’s variegated experiences of racism, from “the hot-brute hatred of America” to “the sepulchral-cold hostility of the English” during a London sojourn. Elegantly written and carefully reasoned, this is a fascinating look at the political evolution of a key literary figure. Photos. (July)