PENGUIN CLASSICS

ROMANCE IN MARSEILLE

CLAUDE MCKAY (1889–1948), born Festus Claudius McKay, is widely regarded as one of the most important literary and political writers of the interwar period and the Harlem Renaissance. Born in Jamaica, he moved to the United States in 1912 to study at the Tuskegee Institute. In 1928, he published his most famous novel, Home to Harlem, which won a Harmon Foundation award for literature. He also published two other novels, Banjo and Banana Bottom, as well as a collection of short stories, Gingertown, two autobiographical books, A Long Way from Home and My Green Hills of Jamaica, and a work of nonfiction, Harlem: Negro Metropolis. His Complete Poems were published posthumously, and in 1977 he was named the national poet of Jamaica.

GARY EDWARD HOLCOMB is professor of African American Literature and Studies in the Department of African American Studies at Ohio University. His books are Teaching Hemingway and Race (2018), Hemingway and the Black Renaissance (2012), and Claude McKay, Code Name Sasha: Queer Black Marxism and the Harlem Renaissance (2007), a study that includes a chapter devoted to Romance in Marseille.

WILLIAM J. MAXWELL is professor of English and African and African American Studies at Washington University in St. Louis. He is the author of F.B. Eyes: How J. Edgar Hoover’s Ghostreaders Framed African American Literature (2015), which won the American Book Award in 2016, and New Negro, Old Left: African-American Writing and Communism Between the Wars (1999). He is the editor of James Baldwin: The FBI File (2017) and Claude McKay’s Complete Poems (2004).