Claude McKay's poetry and his life display the presence of conflicting forces: his sense of identity as a black man and his desire to write out of a traditional literary heritage. While his poem "If We Must Die" has been heralded as a primary motivator for the Harlem Renaissance movement, McKay made few friends in Harlem during the 1920s, and he resisted characterization as a representative of the Harlem literary community. He was troubled that he was so often identified as a black writer rather than as an individual who was struggling to perfect his poetry, which he wanted to be judged by its merit as verse.

The youngest of eleven children, Festus Claudius McKay was born on 15 September 1889 in south-central Jamaica to Thomas Francis and Ann Elizabeth Edwards McKay, and he spent his earliest years near the hills of Clarendon Parish. When he was six years old...