Unsung Voices

Join us at Downtown Huntsville Library this year as we explore writers from the 20th through the 21st century that you may or may not be very familiar with. This month we are reading Harlem Shadows: Poems by Claude McKay.

Claude McKay, born Festus Claudius McKay in Sunny Ville, Jamaica in 1889, was a key figure in the Harlem Renaissance, a prominent literary movement of the 1920s. His work ranged from vernacular verse celebrating peasant life in Jamaica to poems that protested racial and economic inequities. 

McKay has written five novels, four poetry collections, two autobiographical works, and a collection of essays. In 1919, he wrote "If We must Die", one of his best known works, a widely reprinted sonnet responding to the wave of white-on-black race riots and lynchings following the conclusion of the First World War. His 1922 poetry collection, Harlem Shadows, was among the first books published during the Harlem Renaissance and his novel Home To Harlem was a watershed contribution to its fiction. 

In 1929, McKay won the Harmon Foundation Award for distinguished literary achievement, NAACP, for Harlem Shadows and Home to Harlem. McKay passed away in 1948, but left a tremendous legacy behind.

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