The Remaking of the Radical in the Harlem Renaissance: Claude McKay’s Home to Harlem

Abstract

Home to Harlem, one of the first successful African American novels, inspired from the urban lower classes’ life, produced both revulsion and fascination. W.E.B. Du Bois stated that Claude McKay had proved African Americans were “buffoons, thugs, and rotters anyway” (245). However, the novel was successful, pointing to a 1920s fascination with the lower classes. This article analyzes the intersection of race and class in Home to Harlem and shows that the novel proposes a composite model for a radical subject.