Description

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From the author of Home to Harlem, a novel about dreams, diaspora, and drifting back home

Lincoln Agrippa Daily, known to his drifter cohorts on the 1920s Marseilles waterfront as “Banjo,” passes his days panhandeling and dreaming of starting his own little band. At night, Banjo, Malty, Ginger, Dengel, Bugsy, Taloufa, Goosey, and even Jake of Home to Harlem prowl the rough waterfront bistros, drinking, looking for women, playing music, fighting, loving, and talking—about their homes in Sengal, the West Indies, or the American South; about Garvey’s Back-to-Africa Movement; about being Black. When Ray, a writer, joins the group, it triggers his rediscovery of his African roots and his feeling that, at last, he belongs to a race, “weighted, tested, and poised in the universal scheme.” 

About the Author

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Claude McKay (1889–1948), born Festus Claudius McKay, is widely regarded as one of the most important literary and political writers of the interwar period and the Harlem Renaissance. Born in Jamaica, he moved to the U.S. in 1912 to study at the Tuskegee Institute. In 1928, he published his most famous novel, Home to Harlem, which won the Harmon Gold Award for Literature. He also published two other novels, Banjo and Banana Bottom, as well as a collection of short stories, Gingertown, two autobiographical books, A Long Way from Home and My Green Hills of Jamaica, and a work of nonfiction, Harlem: Negro Metropolis. His Selected Poems was published posthumously, and in 1977 he was named the national poet of Jamaica.