Most of the poets who gained fame during the Harlem Renaissance were Americans. However, Jamaican born Claude McKay had a profound impact during the Harlem Renaissance in America and overseas. McKay was born on September 15, 1890 in Sunny Ville, Jamaica. Before he immigrated to the United States in 1912, he released Songs of Jamaica.
In the United States, McKay studied agriculture at Tuskegee Institute and Kansas State University. In 1914, he quit school and moved to Harlem under the pseudonym Eli Edwards, which came from his wife’s name Eulalie Imelda Edwards. That same year he divorced his wife after six months of marriage and before their daughter’s birth.
In 1919, he moved to London for two years. He stayed in Europe for the next fifteen years and continued to write literature and poetry. In 1922, McKay wrote “Harlem Shadows” and addressed the Third Communist International. He then wrote Sudom Lincha (Trial by Lynching) and Negry v. Amerike (The Negroes in America) in Russian and they were later translated into English. Subsequently, he gained an interest in Marxism due to the belief that it’ll lead to racial equality.
Between 1923 and 1934, McKay lived in Paris, Marseilles, and Morocco. In Marseilles, he wrote the novels Home to Harlem in 1928 and Banjo in 1929. During this time, he renounced communism and wrote a book of short stories entitled "Gingertown." He also wrote his most controversial poem “If We Must Die” (below) during this time period. It was written during the Chicago riots and it received a lot of misinterpretations. William Stanley Braithwaite believed McKay to be a “violent and angry propagandist.”
In 1934, McKay returned to the United States as a laborer in a welfare camp. He later wrote about his life after leaving Jamaica in the book A Long Way from Home. McKay’s last few years were spent in the Roman Catholic Church after he was baptized in 1944. Four years later, on May 22, 1948, he died in Chicago.
http://www.english.uiuc.edu/maps/poets/m_r/mckay/mckay.htm
