Harlem Shadows: The Poems of Claude McKay

From the late 1910s to the mid 1930s, Harlem, New York City, was the center of an explosion of African-American social, artistic, and intellectual expression that came to be known as the Harlem Renaissance. Drawing African-Americans by the thousands to the 3-square-mile neighborhood in Manhattan, this historic movement represented, in the words of the author Claude McKay's contemporary Alain Locke, a "spiritual coming of age" that transformed the outlook of newly-emancipated people from one of "social disillusionment to race pride."Among the many figures whose thought and writings impelled the Harlem Renaissance was the young poet Claude McKay, a Jamaican farmer of African descent who left his Caribbean village to pursue an intellectual life in the United States. Harlem Shadows, first published in 1922, is a collection of the author's best poems, which cemented his role as a leader of the movement.Harlem Shadows deals with a wide variety of themes-from nostalgic tales of the peaceful p