Thurman, and Margaret Murray Washington.
Other entries included profiles of the writers Phillis
Wheatley, Frances Harper, and Elizabeth Keckley.
The volume was an impressive contribution to the
growing field of African-American historiography
and American women’s history.
Bibliography
Hallie Q. Brown, Homespun Heroines and Other Women
of Distinction.Introduction by Randall K. Burkett.
New York: Oxford University Press, 1988.
Home to Harlem Claude McKay(1928)
The first novel by Jamaican-born writer CLAUDE
MCKAY. Published in 1928 by HARPER&BROTH-
ERS, it enjoyed brisk sales, prompted controversial
reviews, and contributed to McKay’s reputation as
a writer with a keen eye for deft cultural critique.
In late 1926 McKay had productive meetings
with William Aspenwall Bradley, an influential lit-
erary agent who had represented Edith Wharton,
Gertrude Stein, and Katherine Anne Porter. The
two met in Antibes, FRANCE, where McKay was
sojourning with Eliena and MAXEASTMAN. It was
Bradley who urged McKay to develop further
“Home to Harlem,” his short story about a World
War I soldier named Jake. McKay, inspired by good
writing days and pressing financial needs, com-
pleted the novel in less than six months. Eugene
Saxton, his editor at Harper, made few changes in
the novel, and it was ready for distribution by the
winter of 1927.
Claude McKay described his newly published
novel Home to Harlemas “an impudent dog” that
had “moved right in among the best sellers” in
New York [Cooper, 237]. The novel quickly ex-
ceeded expected sales records. LANGSTON
HUGHEScongratulated McKay for a work that he
really liked and also found “so damned real”
[Bernard, 61]. Hughes’s ebullience was in stark
contrast to the distaste that W. E. B. DUBOIS,
scholar and CRISIS editor, directed toward the
work. He openly admitted that the novel “nause-
ate[d]” him and that “after the dirtier parts of its
filth I feel distinctly like taking a bath” [Giles, 69].
Indeed, even Hughes recognized the depths of de-
spair and gritty realism of the book. In a letter to
CARLVANVECHTEN, author of NIGGERHEAVEN,
a book that many suggested had been an inspira-
tion for McKay, Hughes offered a memorable de-
scription of the novel. “[I]f yours was Nigger
Heaven,” he wrote, “this is Nigger Hell.”
Home to Harlempolarized the older and younger
generations of Harlem Renaissance writers and
scholars. DuBois and other establishment figures,
such as OPPORTUNITY editor and sociologist
CHARLES S. JOHNSON and director of the NA-
TIONALASSOCIATION FOR THEADVANCEMENT OF
COLOREDPEOPLEJAMESWELDONJOHNSON, re-
garded the novel as an unwholesome work that
perpetuated racial stereotypes and denigrated
women. McKay’s contemporaries, such as Langston
Hughes and COUNTEECULLEN, embraced the work
wholeheartedly, encouraged by its vibrancy, unre-
strained portrait of middle-class life, and evocations
of the jazz era.
McKay dedicated the novel to “My friend
Louise Bryant.” It was Bryant, a white widow who
remarried William Bullitt, a wealthy Philadelphian,
who went to McKay’s aid when he was suffering
badly from influenza in Paris in the early 1920s.
The novel’s 21 chapters, divided into three sec-
tions, center on the life and adventures of Jake, a
World War I veteran who returns home to HARLEM,
a place that immediately gratifies his senses and
enables him to indulge himself. Shortly after he ar-
rives, he begins to spend the pay earned on the
awful freighter on which he crossed the Atlantic.
He targets a young prostitute in a LENOXAVENUE
cabaret who also recognizes him as a viable client
because of his “hungry wolf’s eyes” (11). The early
chapters chronicle Jake’s seemingly endless adven-
tures, late-night brawls at various nightclubs, early
morning drinking, and reminiscences with men
like Zeddy, with whom he considers the benefits
and shortfalls of liaisons with women. He has the
good fortune to benefit from women like the mu-
latto woman Congo Rose, “a wonderful tissue of
throbbing flesh,” who takes him in and allows him
to lodge, rent free.
Once he leaves Harlem aboard a train on
which he has taken a job as a waiter, Jake has the
opportunity to glimpse a larger world and to hear
absorbing history of Africans that leaves him
longing for more. In his first encounter with Ray,
a Haitian waiter on the railroad who has studied
at HOWARDUNIVERSITY, he learns of Sappho,Home to Harlem 243