Claude McKay

Festus Claudius McKay was born on September 15, 1889, in Nairne Castle, Clarendon Parish, Jamaica, the youngest of eleven children of small landowners Thomas Francis and Hannah Ann Elizabeth Edwards McKay. Tutored by his older brother Uriah Theophilus, a schoolteacher, and the English folklorist Walter Jekyll, he absorbed both Jamaican Creole and the British Romantic poets. In 1912, at twenty-two, he published two volumes of dialect verse, Songs of Jamaica and Constab Ballads, drawing on his service in the Jamaica Constabulary.

That year he sailed to the United States to study agriculture at Tuskegee Institute and then at Kansas State College, but soon abandoned farming for writing in New York City. Working as a railway dining-car waiter, he placed poems in Seven Arts and The Liberator, where he later became co-executive editor. His sonnet If We Must Die, written during the Red Summer of 1919, was reprinted across the Black press and remains his best-known poem; Winston Churchill is sometimes said to have quoted it during World War II, though that attribution is disputed.

McKay traveled widely between 1919 and 1934 — to London, Moscow (where he addressed the Fourth Congress of the Communist International in 1922), Berlin, Paris, Marseille, and Tangier — and produced the verse collection Harlem Shadows (1922) along with the novels Home to Harlem (1928), Banjo (1929), and Banana Bottom (1933). His autobiography A Long Way from Home appeared in 1937.

He converted to Roman Catholicism in 1944, became a U.S. citizen in 1940, and spent his final years in Chicago working with the Catholic Youth Organization. He died of heart failure on May 22, 1948.

The name Claude comes from the Latin Claudius, a Roman family name meaning lame or limping. A masculine name borne by emperors and Catholic saints alike, it carries a quiet, continental tone — fitting for a Jamaican poet whose verse moved between dialect lyric and the strict English sonnet.