LETTERS IN EXILE

The journeys of a Black literary modernist.

Claude McKay (1889-1948) is remembered for his poetry, journalism, memoirs, and fiction. His output also includes a prolific crop of letters. His correspondents were prominent intellectuals, artists, and activists such as Alain Locke, W.E.B. Du Bois, Langston Hughes, Jean Toomer, James Weldon Johnson, H.L. Mencken, Nancy Cunard, and Max Eastman, among many others. From widely dispersed archival sources, literary scholars Hefner and Holcomb have gathered McKay’s letters from 1916 to 1934, years he spent traveling in the Soviet Union, Europe, and North Africa. In a brief biographical summary sent to literary agent William A. Bradley, McKay wrote that he was born in Jamaica, came to the U.S. in 1912 to attend Tuskegee Institute, and left after six months, when he enrolled at Kansas State College. In 1914, he made his way to New York, where he ran a cabaret and, when that failed, took on odd jobs. Money troubles recur in his letters—sometimes he doesn’t eat for days—as does alienation. McKay, the editors assert, felt like an “outsider to national and cultural ideologies,” a severe critic of capitalism and “Imperial abomination.” Black, queer, politically radical, he “spent most of his life searching for what ‘home’ meant to him.” The letters reveal an intense, uncompromising man: “Life fascinates me in its passions,” he wrote to writer and socialist Eastman, a close friend. They reveal romantic and sexual liaisons, friendships made and broken, and his take on national character—he finds Russians warm-hearted and Arabs “curious and eager like keen knife blades.” Most definitely, his literary work consumes him. Judiciously annotated, introduced by a detailed biographical essay, and appended with a glossary of names, the collection will be an indispensable source for readers and researchers.

Letters cohere into a multifaceted portrait of a man and his times.