poetic BIRTHDAY

CLAUDE MCKAY was born in Sunny Ville, Jamaica on September 15, 1889.  His love for his island home inspired his first two books of poetry which were published in 1912. Most of these poems were in Jamaican dialect.

MCKAY'S best-known poems are militant and angry sonnets which urges people to fight against injustice.

In 1922 MCKAY published his most important collection of poems, Harlem Shadows. These poems express Black America's mood of desperation and defiance.

MCKAY was also a writer who wrote novels. His novel Home to Harlem, published in 1928, was the first best-seller by a Black author and won the Harmon Foundation Gold Medal Award for Literature.

MCKAY died in 1948.

For a bio and a sampling of his poetry and writings GOOGLE his name