Letters in Exile // Transnational Journeys of a Harlem Renaissance Writer

A collection of private correspondence from one of the Harlem Renaissance’s brightest and most radical voices

The Jamaican-born, queer author Claude McKay (1890-1948) was a central figure of the Harlem Renaissance. His 1919 poem “If We Must Die” expressed a revolutionary vision for militant Black protest art, while his novels, includingHome to Harlem,Banjo, andBanana Bottom, described ordinary Black life in lyrical prose. Yet for all that McKay connected himself to Harlem, he was a restless world traveler who sought spiritual, artistic, and political sustenance in France, Spain, Moscow, and Morocco.

Brooks E. Hefner and Gary Edward Holcomb bring together two decades of McKay’s never-before-published dispatches from the road with correspondents including W. E. B. Du Bois, Langston Hughes, Alain Locke, Max Eastman, and Louise Bryant. With wit, wisdom, insight, and sometimes irascible temper, McKay describes how he endured harassment from British authorities in London and worked alongside Leon Trotsky and Alexander Kerensky in Bolshevik Moscow. He reflects on Paris’s Lost Generation, immerses himself in the Marseille dockers’ noir subculture, and observes French colonialism in Morocco. Providing a new perspective on a unique figure of American modernism, this collection reveals McKay gossiping, cajoling, and confiding as he engages in spirited debates and challenges the political and artistic questions of the day.

Claude McKay(1890-1948) was a luminary of the Harlem Renaissance and a major figure in Black transnational, Black queer, and Black Marxist history. His books include the poetry collectionHarlem Shadowsand the novelsHome to HarlemandBanjoand the posthumously publishedAmiable with Big TeethandRomance in Marseille.

Brooks E. Hefneris professor of English at James Madison University. He is the author ofThe Word on the Streets: The American Language of Vernacular ModernismandBlack Pulp: Genre Fiction in the Shadow of Jim Crow. He lives in Charlottesville, VA.

Gary Edward Holcombis professor of African American literature at Ohio University. He is the author ofClaude McKay, Code Name Sasha: Queer Black Marxism and the Harlem Renaissanceand coeditor of McKay’sRomance in Marseille. He lives in Athens, OH.

• Publisher: Yale University Press
• Publish Date: September 02, 2025
• Pages: 512
• Language: English
• Type: Hardback
• EAN/UPC: 9780300276473
• Dimensions: 8.5 X 6.2 X 1.3 inches | 1.9 pounds
• BISAC Categories: Literary Fiction