Home to Harlem
Claude McKay’s most well-known Harlem Renaissance novel now in Penguin Classics
A Penguin Classic
Claude McKay’s first novel, Home to Harlem, was published in 1928 during the height of the Harlem Renaissance. McKay portrays Harlem post-WWI through two Black migrants to New York: Jake, a Southern-born African American longshoreman who deserts the U.S. army and returns to his home in Harlem; and Ray, an educated Haitian immigrant. With his innovative use of Black dialects, McKay portrays a complex world of Black people, both native-born and immigrant, who navigate a dynamic society in the midst of radical change. Harlem is portrayed as a cauldron of Black life where Black people experience both White racism and intra-Black prejudice as well as sexual freedom and pleasure,…