[1][2] In 1887 McClellan came to Louisville, Kentucky, to work as a Congregationalist minister,[3] later taking a pastoral position in Memphis, Tennessee.

[8] Path of Dreams (1916) was published in part to raise funds for McClellan's son Theodore, who contracted tuberculosis.

[6] George brought Theodore to Los Angeles, California, to be treated, but he was denied entry to a sanatorium because he was Black and died on January 5, 1917.

Along with his writing he worked as a chaplain and a teacher at the State Normal School for colored persons located in Alabama.

[14] Critic Dickson D. Bruce Jr., who considers McClellan's poetry conservative and sentimentalist, notes that it generally treats common themes of the time such as "nature, love, or religion".

[1] According to the literary scholar Joan R. Sherman, McClellan's poems illustrate the poetic narrator's "struggle to deal with his 'double consciousness'".

[2] In other work, Sherman notes that McClellan "suffered keenly" from double consciousness as a "black artist" who was "highly intelligent, sensitive, ambitious, and race-proud".

[11] Sterling Allen Brown "largely dismissed" McClellan's work, viewing it as "the same-old romantic escapism of much of African-American literature".