Open Daily: 10am - 10pm | Alley door pickup 10am - 7pm 3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
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  • Open Daily: 10am - 10pm
    Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm

    3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
    612-822-4611

Open Daily: 10am - 10pm | Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm
3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
612-822-4611
Letters in Exile: Transnational Journeys of a Harlem Renaissance Writer

Letters in Exile: Transnational Journeys of a Harlem Renaissance Writer

McKay, Claude
Hefner, Brooks E.
Holcomb, Gary Edward

Hardcover

Letters & EssaysLiterary CriticismPoetry Criticism

Publisher Price: $38.00

ISBN10: 0300276478
ISBN13: 9780300276473
Publisher: Yale University Press
Published: Sep 2 2025
Pages: 512
Weight: 1.90
Height: 1.30 Width: 6.20 Depth: 8.50
Language: English
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, including Home to Harlem, Banjo, and Banana 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.

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