Harlem Shadows: The Poems of Claude McKay.

MCKAY, Claude. [Introduction by Max Eastman].

$1,500.00

Item Number: 149309

New York: Harcourt, Brace and Company, 1922.

First edition of McKay’s groundbreaking volume of over 50 poems together in book form for the first time; the first book of poetry to emerge from the Harlem Renaissance. Octavo, original publisher’s half cloth with printed paper spine label. In near fine condition.Bookplate to the pastedown. Rare and desirable.

McKay, whose Harlem Shadows was "the Harlem Renaissance's first book of poetry," was a "proud child of Black Jamaica, diehard bohemian, globe-trotting radical." His poetry is "second to none in the Jamaican and Harlem cultural renaissances… James Weldon Johnson christened McKay as the 'most powerful voice' in postwar Black poetry and 'one of the principal forces in bringing about the Negro Literary Awakening.'" Yet this revolutionary work, which paid McKay "exactly $491.79 in lifetime royalties… [was] his first and only American poetry collection" published in his lifetime. A core poem in Harlem Shadows is the work considered McKay's "calling card… the anthemic Shakespearean sonnet If We Must Die, one of the landmark political poems of the 20th century… copied, recited and committed to memory ever since." Together with Harlem Dancer, Outcast, White City, Enslaved, Lynching and all others together in book form for the first time, McKay propelled "disciplined expressions of Black rage and resistance into the mainstream of African American literature… In signaling Black ironies from beneath the sonnet's upright white mask, he performs the specifically Black modernism maneuver Houston Baker names the 'mastery of form'" (Maxwell, Claude McKay—Lyric Poetry in the Age of Cataclysm).