Claude McKay travelled to New York from Jamaica in 1912. In addition to his novels Banjo and Banana Bottom, he is perhaps most widely remembered for his poems, of which the most significant collection is Harlem Shadows (1922). James Weldon Johnson remarked that "Claude McKay's poetry was one of the great forces in bringing about what is often called the 'Negro Literary Renaissance.'" McKay completed his autobiography, A Long Way from Home, in 1937. He died in 1948.
