He moved to New York City in 1914 and, 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.

[2] Besides these novels and four published collections of poetry, McKay also authored a collection of short stories, Gingertown (1932); two autobiographical books, A Long Way from Home (1937) and My Green Hills of Jamaica (published posthumously in 1979); and Harlem: Negro Metropolis (1940), consisting of eleven essays on the contemporary social and political history of Harlem and Manhattan, concerned especially with political, social and labor organizing.

McKay was introduced to British Fabian socialism in his teens by his elder brother and tutor Uriah Theodore, and after moving to the United States in his early 20s encountered the American socialist left in the work of W. E. B.

Du Bois and through his membership in the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW) — the only American left-labor organization of the era that was totally open to Negro members (as he comments), continuing the tradition of the populist People's Party of the previous generation.

Realizing that he was being manipulated and used by the Party apparatus, and responding critically to the authoritarian bent of the Soviet regime, he left for Western Europe in 1923, first for Hamburg, then Paris, then the South of France, Barcelona and Morocco.

After his return to Harlem in 1934, he found himself in frequent contention with the Stalinist New York City Communist Party which sought to dominate the left politics and writing community of the decade.

His sonnet sequence, "The Cycle," published posthumously in the Complete Poems, deals at length with McKay's confrontation with the left political machine of the time.

Increasingly ill in the mid-40s, he was rescued from extremely impoverished circumstances by a Catholic Worker friend and installed in a communal living situation; later in the decade, he converted to Catholicism and died in 1948.

Despite his superior academic performance, in 1914, he decided he did not want to be an agronomist and moved to New York City, where he married his childhood sweetheart Eulalie Imelda Lewars.

Harris featured four poems and a short prose piece about his biography and poetics, in the September 1918 issue of the magazine, McKay's first prominent appearance in print.

[14] As co-editor of The Liberator, he published one of his most famous poems, "If We Must Die", during the "Red Summer", a period of intense racial violence against black people in Anglo-American societies.

In early fall 1919 McKay traveled to London, perhaps prompted by pressure from the Justice Department which was engaged in a nationwide attack on pacifists, socialists and labor organizers (the "Palmer Raids") which especially targeted the IWW.

At the International Socialist Club, McKay met Shapurji Saklatvala, A. J. Cook, Guy Aldred, Jack Tanner, Arthur McManus, William Gallacher, Sylvia Pankhurst, and George Lansbury.

[citation needed] In April 1920, the Daily Herald, a socialist paper published by George Lansbury, included a racist article written by E. D. Morel.

I write because I feel that the ultimate result of your propaganda will be further strife and blood-spilling between whites and the many members of my race... who have been dumped down on the English docks since the ending of the European war... Bourbons of the United States will thank you, and the proletarian underworld of London will certainly gloat over the scoop of the Christian-Socialist pacifist Daily Herald.

[citation needed] When Sylvia Pankhurst was arrested under the Defence of the Realm Act for publishing articles "calculated and likely to cause sedition among His Majesty's forces, in the Navy, and among the civilian population," McKay had his rooms searched.

[19] In November 1922, in what he referred to as his "Magic Pilgrimage," he traveled to Russia to participate in the Fourth Congress of the Communist International in Petrograd and Moscow, where he encountered Max Eastman who was also a delegate.

[20] McKay financed his trip to Russia by repackaging and selling Harlem Shadows, "complete with a signed photograph and an inflated price tag" to members of an NAACP donor list and conserved the funds thus raised by working his way across the Atlantic from New York to Liverpool as a stoker on a freighter.

In The Negro Novel in America, Robert Bone wrote that it represented "different ways of rebelling against Western civilization", adding that McKay was not entirely successful in articulating his protagonists.

After the manuscript was rejected by Harper and Dutton, he wrote to his old friend and editor Max Eastman, asking him "to look through" all the poems and to make any needed revisions.

[23] Before his conversion, he had written to Max Eastman, about "doing a lot of reading and research, especially on Catholic work among Negroes—Because if and when I take the step I want to be intellectually honest and sincere about it".

In her article "Caribbean Models for Modernism in the Work of Claude McKay and Jean Rhys", Leah Rosenberg writes: "The fascination with African art and its identification with female sexuality was characteristic of modernist and avant-garde primitivism".

Through his experience, McKay saw first-hand how the larger social hegemony between European white supremacy and people of Afro-Caribbean descent could play itself out between the artist and its subject.

In his 1929 work, Banjo: a Story Without a Plot, McKay included poignant commentary on the Western prioritization of business over racial justice through the character Ray.

He never officially "came out" as it was considered a societal taboo or explicitly state his sexual preference, but over the years he appears to have frequented and enjoyed the "clandestine" homosexual communities of New York as well as relationships of intermediate duration with several women.

In and of itself, this may not seem to indicate a romantic nature to their future relationship, but as Ray initially considers Banjo's proposal to go off together, he recalls how much joy he associated with the dream of "loafing after their labors long enough to laugh and love and jazz and fight.

To Du Bois, the novel's frank depictions of sexuality and the nightlife in Harlem only appealed to the "prurient demand[s]" of white readers and publishers looking for portrayals of black "licentiousness."

McKay also authored a collection of short stories, Gingertown (1932), two autobiographical books, A Long Way from Home (1937) and My Green Hills of Jamaica (published posthumously in 1979), and a non-fiction, socio-historical treatise entitled Harlem: Negro Metropolis (1940).

[45] Claude McKay's poem "If We Must Die" was recited in the film August 28: A Day in the Life of a People, which debuted at the opening of the Smithsonian's National Museum of African American History and Culture in 2016.

Entitled Amiable With Big Teeth: A Novel of the Love Affair Between the Communists and the Poor Black Sheep of Harlem, the manuscript was discovered in 2009 by Columbia graduate student Jean-Christophe Cloutier in the Samuel Roth Papers, a previously untouched university archive.