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My Green Hills of Jamaica and Five Jamaican Short Stories by Claude McKay. Kingston. 1979. Heinemann. Edited and with an introduction by Mervyn Morris. 162 pages. paperback. Front cover photograph reproduced by courtesy of the Jamaican Tourist Board.

 

my green hills of jamaica heinemann 1979DESCRIPTION - This book brings together Claude McKay's draft of 'My Hills of Jamaica' (an autobiography of his early years) and five short stories which draw directly on that area of experience. McKay had been working on the autobiography when he wrote to Max Eastman in August, 1946: 'My new book is about my childhood in Jamaica which is a source of inexhaustible material.' That inexhaustible material has been mined in Songs of Jamaica and Gonstab Ballads (two collections of dialect poetry, both published in 1912); in the nostalgic poems, many from about 1920, conveniently grouped as 'Songs for Jamaica’ in Selected Poems (1953); in the Jamaican stories reprinted here from Gingertown (1932); in his finest novel, Banana Bottom (1933); and in the 'new book', McKay's second autobiography, drafted only a year or two before he died. In 1953 there was published in Phylon an article called ‘Boyhood in Jamaica', 'by Claude McKay'. A useful sampling of extracts from the draft autobiography, it seems to have been intrusively edited; it introduces phrases, sentences, even whole paragraphs which do not appear in the typescript of ‘My Green Hills' and some of which it is hard to believe McKay (then five years dead) might have written or approved. - FROM THE INTRODUCTION.

 


McKay ClaudeAUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Claude McKay was born in Jamaica on 15th September, 1890. He began writing poetry as a schoolboy. He worked as a policeman in Spanish Town and when he was twenty-two had his first volume of poems, SONGS OF JAMAICA (1912) published. In 1912 McKay moved to the United States where he attended Tuskegee Institute in Alabama and Kansas State University. He continued to write poetry and in 1918 his work was praised by both Frank Harris and Max Eastman. The following year, his poem, ‘If We Must Die,' was published in Eastman's journal, The Liberator. Frank Harris encouraged McKay to obtain writing experience in England. In 1919 McKay travelled to England where he met George Bernard Shaw who introduced him to influential left-wing figures in journalism. This included Sylvia Pankhurst, who recruited him to write for her trade union journal, Workers' Dreadnought. While in London McKay read the works of Karl Marx and becomes a committed socialist. In 1921 McKay returned to New York and became associate editor of The Liberator. Over the next year the journal published articles by McKay such as ‘How Black Sees Green and Red' and ‘He Who Gets Slapped.' He also published his best known volume of verse, HARLEM SHADOWS (1922). In 1922 McKay went to Third International in Moscow where he represented the American Workers Party. He stayed in Europe where he wrote TRIAL BY LYNCHING: STORIES ABOUT NEGRO LIFE IN AMERICA (1925) and HOME TO HARLEM (1928), a novel about a disillusioned black soldier in the US Army who returns from the Western Front to live in a black ghetto. This was followed by other novels such as BANJO (1928), GINGERTOWN (1932) and BANANA BOTTOM (1933). McKay gradually lost faith in communism and returned to the United States in 1934. Employment was difficult to find and for a while he worked for the Federal Writers' Project. McKay's published work during this period included his autobiography, A LONG WAY FROM HOME (1937) and HARLEM: NEGRO METROPOLIS (1940). Unable to make a living from writing, McKay found work in a shipbuilding yard. In 1943 he suffers a stroke and the following year was baptized into the Roman Catholic faith. In 1945 his essay, On Becoming a Roman Catholic, was published. Claude McKay died in Chicago on May 22, 1948.

 

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