"A PIONEER IN 20TH-CENTURY BLACK LITERATURE": FIRST EDITION OF CLAUDE MCKAY'S CONTROVERSIAL FIRST NOVEL, HOME TO HARLEM

McKAY, Claude. Home to Harlem. New York and London: Harper & Brothers, 1928. Octavo, original three-quarter black cloth and marbled boards, decorative endpapers, original dust jacket.

First edition, first issue, of the breakthrough first novel by McKay—"a writer of genius" (James Weldon Johnson)—published at the height of the Harlem Renaissance, a powerful expression of his revolutionary focus on "the nature of the modern world, the position of blacks in it," in rarely found original dust jacket with design by renowned African American artist Aaron Douglas.

Published at the height of the Harlem Renaissance, McKay's first novel, the first bestseller by any African American novelist, sparked immediate controversy when it "became the focus of a battle that had been raging in the black press since 1926 between members of the younger generation of writers and older racial leaders who had nourished them to maturity. It involved, as McKay had foreseen, questions of artistic freedom versus traditional preoccupations with racial advancement… A pioneer in 20th-century black literature in the West Indies, the United States and Africa… he seized intuitively upon those themes… that have dominated black literature—and much of Western literature." As in his poetry, McKay here explores "areas of the black experience that had seldom, if ever, been given such direct expression by a black artist." Langston Hughes, who became a good friend, especially heralded the novel as a powerful expression of the struggle for African American creative freedom and wrote McKay: "I think you've written a wonderful book." Another "note of praise that especially pleased McKay came from F. Scott Fitzgerald," who wrote McKay: "[I] can't tell you how I enjoyed your book… one of the two most worthy novels of the spring'" (Cooper, Claude McKay, vii-viii, 242-47). Home to Harlem became "the first of four volumes (Banjo, 1929; Gingertown, 1932; and Banana Bottom, 1933) in which McKay progressively defined the nature of the modern world, the position of blacks in it, and his own wanderings as an expatriate poet and writer" (Concise Oxford Companion, 203). "First edition" stated on copyright page with code "A-C" indicating publication in January 1928. Dust jacket with small publisher's notice tipped to front panel.

Book fine; light edge-wear, archival tape reinforcement to verso of colorful extremely good dust jacket.