The novel is partly based on the real-life experiences of Nelson Simeon Dede, a Nigerian sailor McKay had met in Marseille.

[3] Building on his second novel, Banjo: A Story Without a Plot (1929), McKay began composing what would become Romance in Marseille in September 1929, initially calling it "The Jungle and the Bottoms."

However, McKay ultimately abandoned the project in 1933 amid the Great Depression, leaving the work in its most complete form and with the final title, Romance in Marseille.

A truncated draft is kept in the collection of the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library at Yale University, while the lengthier, complete, and final version is held at the Schomberg Center for Research in Black Culture in Harlem.

Readers learn that he is a sailor from English West Africa, and that he had been forced to stow away on a liner after a prostitute named Aslima robs him.

At the end of the novel, Aslima is killed in a fight with her jealous pimp: "He shot the remaining bullets into her body, cursing and calling upon hell to swallow her soul.

Additionally, the transport and mistreatment of black bodies across the Atlantic is a topic that returns repeatedly throughout the novel, emphasizing the specter of slave trading in Western culture.