By Dr Oliver Tearle (Loughborough University)
The poet and novelist Claude McKay (1889-1948) is widely seen as the progenitor of the literary movement that would become known as the Harlem Renaissance. Indeed, along with Langston Hughes, McKay is perhaps the poet who did more than any other to raise the profile of this group of African American writers, artists, and musicians working in New York in the 1920s.