Frank Norris, Home to Harlem gives insights into
the self-affirming lives of working-class blacks who
inhabit a modern world in which they are trapped,
pessimistically determined in the classical natural-
ist sense by heredity and environment.
In contrast to Home to Harlem, neither Banjo
nor Banana Bottom was a financial success, al-
though reviewers were generally kind. Set in
Marseille, Banjo focuses on more Pan-African
political issues, including colonization, although
the protagonist, Agrippa Daily (Banjo), like Jake,
is also involved in a quest for spiritual wholeness.
McKay uses Ray, his intellectual alter ego who is
introduced in Home to Harlem, as his spokesman
in Banjo.
Considered by many critics to be McKay’s best
novel, Banana Bottom, a romantic tale, is set in
the pastoral world of Jamaica, for which McKay
seemed ever to yearn. Although its heroine, Bita
Plant, is formally educated and “refined” in En-
gland, she returns to her Jamaican roots, embraces
Jamaica’s folk culture, and marries her father’s
drayman, resolving the conflicts she had encoun-
tered between her cultural roots and colonizing
experience.
McKay’s nonfiction works include two autobi-
ographies, A Long Way from Home (1937) and My
Green Hills of Jamaica (published posthumously
in 1979), and a collection of essays, Harlem: Negro
Metropolis (1940). Selected Poems of Claude McKay
(1953) was published posthumously. Ironically,
ever the freethinker and political radical, McKay
converted to Catholicism in 1944. He died in Chi-
cago, on May 22, 1948, a long way from home.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Cooper, Wayne. Claude McKay: Rebel Sojourner in the
Harlem Renaissance. New York: Schocken, 1987.
———, ed. The Passion of Claude McKay. New York:
Schocken, 1973.
Huggins, Nathan I. Harlem Renaissance. New York:
Oxford University Press, 1971.
McDowell, E. Deborah. The Changing Same: Black
Women’s Literature, Criticism, and Theory. Bloom-
ington: Indiana University Press, 1995.
McKay, Claude. Home to Harlem. Boston: Northeast-
ern University Press, 1987.
———. A Long Way from Home: An Autobiography.
New York: Harvest Books, 1937.
———. Selected Poems of Claude McKay. New York:
Bookman Associates, 1953.
———. Songs of Jamaica. The Dialect Poetry of Claude
McKay. New York: Books for Libraries Press, 1972,
53–54.
Samuels, Wilfred D. Five Afro-Caribbean Voices in
American Culture, 1917–1929. Boulder, Colo.:
Belmont, 1977.
Van Vechten, Carl. Nigger Heaven. New York: Harper
& Row, 1971.
Wilfred D. SamuelsMcKinney-Whetstone, Diane (1955– )
Diane McKinney-Whetstone grew up in Philadel-
phia, where she attended public schools with her
five sisters and one brother. She graduated from
the University of Pennsylvania in 1975 with a
bachelor’s degree in English. Her father served two
terms as a state senator; later, McKinney-Whet-
stone worked for several years at the Philadelphia
City Council and then at the Forest Service. She
lives in Philadelphia with her husband, with whom
she has twins.
Hailed as a writer who participates in writ-
ing and recording “a sort of urban microhistory
of the revival of Philadelphia neighborhoods”
(Ganim, 374), McKinney-Whetstone writes nov-
els of relationships and tradition rooted in the
neighborhoods of South Philadelphia. However,
McKinney-Whetstone is interested in reaching a
wide audience. She accomplishes this by focusing
on family relationships (defined loosely and by
necessity) and domestic issues.
In her first novel, Tumbling (1996), a period
novel that explores the physical and emotional
landscape of a declining neighborhood in the
1940s and 1950s, McKinney-Whetstone explores
questions about two women who live together and
are as close as sisters. The loving couple, Noon
and Herbie, are devoted to each other. Noon’s
traumatic past, told in indirect and haunting frag-
ments, prevents them from consummating their
marriage. They become parents quite by accidentMcKinney-Whetstone, Diane 349