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1. Amiable with big teeth : a novel of the love affair between the communists and the poor black sheep of Harlem LCCN 2016036985 Type of material Book Personal name McKay, Claude, 1890-1948 author. Main title Amiable with big teeth : a novel of the love affair between the communists and the poor black sheep of Harlem / Claude McKay ; edited with an introduction by Jean-Christophe Cloutier, Brent Hayes Edwards. Published/Produced New York, New York : Penguin Books, [2017] Projected pub date 1702 Description pages ; cm. ISBN 9780143107316 (hardcover) Library of Congress Holdings Information not available. 2. A long way from home LCCN 2006019589 Type of material Book Personal name McKay, Claude, 1890-1948. Main title A long way from home / Claude McKay ; edited and with an introduction by Gene Andrew Jarrett. Published/Created New Brunswick, N.J. : Rutgers University Press, c2007. Description xxxix, 270 p. ; 23 cm. ISBN 0813539676 (alk. paper) 9780813539676 (alk. paper) 0813539684 (pbk. : alk. paper) 9780813539683 (pbk. : alk. paper) CALL NUMBER PS3525.A24785 Z46 2007 FT MEADE Copy 2 Request in Jefferson or Adams Building Reading Rooms - STORED OFFSITE

Claude McKay
Born: September 15, 1889 in Sunny Ville, Jamaica
Died: May 22, 1948 in Chicago, Illinois, United States
Other Names : McKay, Festus Claudius; Edwards, Eli
Nationality: American
Occupation: Writer
Contemporary Authors Online. Detroit: Gale, 2017. From Literature Resource Center.
Full Text: COPYRIGHT 2017 Gale, Cengage Learning
Updated:Jan. 27, 2017

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PERSONAL INFORMATION:
Born September 15, 1889 (some sources say 1890), in Sunny Ville, Clarendon Parish, Jamaica, British West Indies (now Jamaica); immigrated to United States, naturalized U.S. citizen, 1940; died of heart failure, May 22, 1948, in Chicago, IL; buried at Calvary Cemetery, Woodside, NY; son of Thomas Francis and Anne Elizabeth (Edwards) McKay; married Eulalie Imelda Edwards, July 30, 1914 (marriage ended); children: Ruth Hope. Education: Attended Tuskegee Normal & Industrial Institute, 1912, and Kansas State College, 1912-14. Religion: Roman Catholic.

CAREER:
Writer. Worked as cabinetmaker's apprentice and wheelwright; constable, Jamaican Constabulary, Kingston, Jamaica, 1909; longshoreman, porter, bartender, and waiter, 1910-14; restaurateur, 1914; writer for Pearsons Magazine, 1918, and Workers' Dreadnought in London, England, 1919; associate editor of Liberator, 1921; American Workers representative at Third International in Moscow, U.S.S.R., 1922; artist's model in mid-1920s; worked for Rex Ingram's film studio in France, c. 1926; shipyard worker, c. 1941; worked with the National Catholic Youth Association, 1944-48.

AWARDS:
Medal from Jamaican Institute of Arts and Sciences, c. 1912; Harmon Foundation Award for distinguished literary achievement from the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), 1929, for Harlem Shadows: The Poems of Claude McKay and Home to Harlem; award from James Weldon Johnson Literary Guild, 1937; awarded the Order of Jamaica and declared national poet, 1977.

WORKS:

WRITINGS:

Songs of Jamaica (poetry; also see below), introduction by Walter Gardner, Gardner (Kingston, Jamaica), 1912, reprinted Mnemosyne (Miami), 1969.
Constab Ballads (poetry; also see below), Watts (London), 1912.
Spring in New Hampshire, and Other Poems, Richards (London), 1920.
Harlem Shadows: The Poems of Claude McKay, introduction by Max Eastman, Harcourt, Brace (New York, NY), 1922.
Negry v Amerike, translated into Russian by P. Okrimenko, Gosudarstvennoe (Moscow), 1923, published as The Negroes in America, re-translated into English from Russian-language version by Robert J. Winter, edited by Alan L. McLeod, Kennikat (Port Washington, NY), 1977.
Sudom Lincha, translated into Russian by A. M. and P. Okrimenko, Ogonek (Moscow), 1925, published as Trial by Lynching: Stories about Negro Life in North America, re-translated into English from Russian-language version by Robert Winter, edited by Alan L. McLeod, preface by H. H. Anniah Gowda, Centre for Commonwealth Literature and Research, University of Mysore (Mysore), 1977.
Home to Harlem (novel), Harper (New York, NY), 1928.
Banjo: A Story without a Plot (novel), Harper, 1929.
Gingertown (short stories), Harper, 1932.
Banana Bottom (novel), Harper, 1933.
A Long Way from Home (autobiography), Furman (New York, NY), 1937.
Harlem: Negro Metropolis (nonfiction), Dutton (New York, NY), 1940.
Selected Poems, introduction by John Dewey, biographical note by Max Eastman, Bookman (New York, NY), 1953.
The Dialectic Poetry of Claude McKay (contains Songs of Jamaica and Constab Ballads), edited by Wayne F. Cooper, Books for Libraries Press (Freeport, NY), 1972.
The Passion of Claude McKay: Selected Poetry and Prose, 1912-1948, edited by Wayne F. Cooper, Schocken (New York, NY), 1973.
My Green Hills of Jamaica, and Five Jamaican Short Stories, edited by Mervyn Morris, Howard University Press (Washington, DC), 1975.
Harlem Glory: A Fragment of Aframerican Life, Kerr (Chicago), 1990.
Romance in Marseilles, edited by Rich Bradbury, University of Exeter Press (Exeter, United Kingdom), 1995.
Selected Poems, Edited and with an introduction by Joan R. Sherman, Dover Publications (Mineloa, NY), 1999.
Complete Poems, University of Illinois Press (Urbana, IL), 2003.
Work represented in anthologies. Contributor to periodicals, including Workers' Dreadnought, Negro World, Catholic Worker, Ebony, Epistle, Interracial Review, Jewish Frontier, Nation, Seven Arts (under pseudonym Eli Edwards), New York Herald Tribune Books, and Phylon.

Collections of McKay's papers are housed in the James Weldon Johnson Collection and in the Papers and Manuscript Collection, both in the Beineke Library, Yale University.

MEDIA ADAPTATIONS:
McKay's poetry has been recorded by Arna Bontemps, Anthology of Negro Poets in the U.S.A.: 200 Years, Folkways Records, and Spectrum in Black: Poems by 20th Century Black Poets, Scott, Foresman, and Company.

Sidelights

Claude McKay was a key figure in the Harlem Renaissance, a prominent literary movement of the 1920s. His work ranged from vernacular verse celebrating peasant life in Jamaica to fairly militant poems challenging white authority in America, and from generally straightforward tales of black life in both Jamaica and America to more philosophically ambitious fiction addressing instinctual/intellectual duality, which McKay found central to the black individual's efforts to cope in a racist society. Consistent in his various writings is his disdain for racism and the sense that bigotry's implicit stupidity renders its adherents pitiable as well as loathsome. As Arthur D. Drayton wrote in his essay "Claude McKay's Human Pity" (included by editor Ulli Beier in the volume Introduction to African Literature): "McKay does not seek to hide his bitterness. But having preserved his vision as poet and his status as a human being, he can transcend bitterness. In seeing . . . the significance of the Negro for mankind as a whole, he is at once protesting as a Negro and uttering a cry for the race of mankind as a member of that race. His human pity was the foundation that made all this possible."

McKay was born in Sunny Ville, Jamaica, in 1889. The son of peasant farmers, he was infused with racial pride and a great sense of his African heritage. His early literary interests, though, were in English poetry. Under the tutelage of his brother, schoolteacher Uriah Theophilus McKay, and a neighboring Englishman, Walter Jekyll, McKay studied the British masters--including John Milton, Alexander Pope, and the later Romantics--and European philosophers such as eminent pessimist Arthur Schopenhauer, whose works Jekyll was then translating from German into English. It was Jekyll who advised aspiring poet McKay to cease mimicking the English poets and begin producing verse in Jamaican dialect.

At age seventeen McKay departed from Sunny Ville to apprentice as a woodworker in Brown's Town. But he studied there only briefly before leaving to work as a constable in the Jamaican capital, Kingston. In Kingston he experienced and encountered extensive racism, probably for the first time in his life. His native Sunny Ville was predominantly populated by blacks, but in substantially white Kingston blacks were considered inferior and capable of only menial tasks. McKay quickly grew disgusted with the city's bigoted society, and within one year he returned home to Sunny Ville.

During his brief stays in Brown's Town and Kingston McKay continued writing poetry, and once back in Sunny Ville, with Jekyll's encouragement, he published the verse collections Songs of Jamaica and Constab Ballads in London in 1912. In these two volumes McKay portrays opposing aspects of black life in Jamaica. Songs of Jamaica presents an almost celebratory portrait of peasant life, with poems addressing subjects such as the peaceful death of McKay's mother and the black people's ties to the Jamaican land. Constab Ballads, however, presents a substantially bleaker perspective on the plight of Jamaican blacks and contains several poems explicitly critical of life in urban Kingston. Writing in The Negro Novel in America, Robert Bone noted the differing sentiments of the two collections, but he also contended that the volumes share a sense of directness and refreshing candor. He wrote: "These first two volumes are already marked by a sharpness of vision, an inborn realism, and a freshness which provides a pleasing contrast with the conventionality which, at this time, prevails among the black poets of the United States."

For Songs of Jamaica McKay received an award and stipend from the Jamaican Institute of Arts and Sciences. He used the money to finance a trip to America, and in 1912 he arrived in South Carolina. He then traveled to Alabama and enrolled at the Tuskegee Institute, where he studied for approximately two months before transferring to Kansas State College. In 1914 he left school entirely for New York City and worked various menial jobs. As in Kingston, McKay encountered racism in New York City, and that racism compelled him to continue writing poetry.

In 1917, under the pseudonym Eli Edwards, McKay published two poems in the periodical Seven Arts. His verses were discovered by critic Frank Hattis, who then included some of McKay's other poems in Pearson's Magazine. Among McKay's most famous poems from this period is "To the White Fiends," a vitriolic challenge to white oppressors and bigots. A few years later McKay befriended Max Eastman, communist sympathizer and editor of the magazine Liberator. McKay published more poems in Eastman's magazine, notably the inspirational "If We Must Die," which defended black rights and threatened retaliation for prejudice and abuse. "Like men we'll face the murderous, cowardly pack," McKay wrote, "Pressed to the wall, dying, but fighting back!" In Black Poets of the United States, Jean Wagner noted that "If We Must Die" transcends specifics of race and is widely prized as an inspiration to persecuted people throughout the world. "Along with the will to resistance of black Americans that it expresses," Wagner wrote, "it voices also the will of oppressed people of every age who, whatever their race and wherever their region, are fighting with their backs against the wall to win their freedom."

Upon publication of "If We Must Die" McKay commenced two years of travel and work abroad. He spent part of 1919 in Holland and Belgium, then moved to London and worked on the periodical Workers' Dreadnought. In 1920 he published his third verse collection, Spring in New Hampshire, which was notable for containing "Harlem Shadows," a poem about the plight of black prostitutes in the degrading urban environment. McKay used this poem, which symbolically presents the degradation of the entire black race, as the title for a subsequent collection.

McKay returned to the United States in 1921 and involved himself in various social causes. The next year he published Harlem Shadows, a collection from previous volumes and periodicals publications. This work contains many of his most acclaimed poems--including "If We Must Die"--and assured his stature as a leading member of the literary movement referred to as the Harlem Renaissance. He capitalized on his acclaim by redoubling his efforts on behalf of blacks and laborers: he became involved in the Universal Negro Improvement Association and produced several articles for its publication, Negro World, and he traveled to the Soviet Union which he had previously visited with Eastman, and attended the Communist Party's Fourth Congress.

Eventually McKay went to Paris, where he developed a severe respiratory infection and supported himself intermittently by working as an artist's model. His infection eventually necessitated his hospitalization, but after recovering he resumed traveling, and for the next eleven years he toured Europe and portions of northern Africa. During this period he also published three novels and a short story collection. The first novel, Home to Harlem, may be his most recognized title. Published in 1928, it concerns a black soldier--Jake--who abruptly abandons his military duties and returns home to Harlem. Jake represents, in rather overt fashion, the instinctual aspect of the individual, and his ability to remain true to his feelings enables him to find happiness with a former prostitute, Felice. Juxtaposed with Jake's behavior is that of Ray, an aspiring writer burdened with despair. His sense of bleakness derives largely from his intellectualized perspective, and it eventually compels him to leave alien, racist America for his homeland of Haiti.

In The Negro Novel in America, Robert Bone wrote that the predominantly instinctual Jake and the intellectual Ray "represent different ways of rebelling against Western civilization." Bone added, however, that McKay was not entirely successful in articulating his protagonists' relationships in white society. He declared that Home to Harlem was "unable to develop its primary conflict" and thus "bogs down in the secondary contrast between Jake and Ray." The novel also provides a detailed portrayal of the underside of black urban life, with its prostitutes and gamblers, and McKay was applauded for creating "a work of vivid social realism," according to Alan L. McLeod in the Dictionary of Literary Biography. However, McKay himself "stressed that he aimed at emotional realism--he wanted to highlight his characters' feelings rather than their social circumstances," McLeod continued. Nevertheless, it was his glimpse into the "unsavory aspects of New York black life" that was prized by readers--and condemned by such prominent black leaders as W. E. B. Du Bois.

Home to Harlem--with its sordid, occasionally harrowing scenes of ghetto life--proved extremely popular, and it gained recognition as the first commercially successful novel by a black writer. McKay quickly followed it with Banjo: A Story without a Plot, a novel about a black vagabond living in the French port of Marseilles. Like Jake from Home to Harlem, protagonist Banjo embodies the largely instinctual way of living, though he is considerably more enterprising and quick-witted than the earlier character. Ray, the intellectual from Home to Harlem, also appears in Banjo. His plight is that of many struggling artists who are compelled by social circumstances to support themselves with conventional employment. Both Banjo and Ray are perpetually dissatisfied and disturbed by their limited roles in white society, and by the end of the novel the men are prepared to depart from Marseilles.

Banjo failed to match the acclaim and commercial success of Home to Harlem, but it confirmed McKay's reputation as a serious, provocative artist. "It was apparent to critics that McKay's imagination had been somewhat strained and that the novel was essentially an autobiographical exercise," McLeod remarked. Commentators have found the autobiographical thread in Home to Harlem and Banjo primarily in the character of Ray, whose peripatetic existence to some extent mirrors the author's own, as does the character's admiration for the beauty of young men's bodies. Patti Cappel Swartz digs for clues to McKay's sexuality in the author's fictional works, and points to a dream sequence in Home to Harlem and the fact that "for Ray, the bonds with men will always supersede those with women," as is shown in the conclusion of Banjo. "Like McKay, Ray is not the marrying kind, but rather the vagabond who must always travel on," Swartz continued.

In his third novel, Banana Bottom, McKay presented a more incisive exploration of his principal theme, the black individual's quest for cultural identity in a white society. Banana Bottom recounts the experiences of a Jamaican peasant girl, Bita, who is adopted by white missionaries after suffering a rape. Bita's new providers try to impose their cultural values on her by introducing her to organized Christianity and the British educational system. Their actions culminate in a horribly bungled attempt to arrange Bita's marriage to an aspiring minister. The prospective groom is exposed as a sexual aberrant, whereupon Bita flees white society. She eventually marries a drayman, Jubban, and raises their child in an idealized peasant Jamaican environment. "Bita has pride in blackness, is free of hypocrisy, and is independent and discerning in her values," remarked McLeod. "Praise for Banana Bottom has been unanimous."

Critics agree that Banana Bottom is McKay's most skillful delineation of the black individual's predicament in white society. Unfortunately, the novel's thematic worth was largely ignored when the book first appeared in 1933. Positive reviews of the time were related to McKay's extraordinary evocation of the Jamaican tropics and his mastery of melodrama. In the ensuing years, though, Banana Bottom has gained increasing acknowledgement as McKay's finest fiction and the culmination of his efforts to articulate his own tension and unease through the novel.

McKay's other noteworthy fiction publication during his final years abroad was Gingertown, a collection of twelve short stories. Six of the tales are devoted to Harlem life, and they reveal McKay's preoccupation with black exploitation and humiliation. Other tales are set in Jamaica and even in North Africa, McKay's last foreign home before he returned to the United States in the mid-1930s. Once back in Harlem he began an autobiographical work, A Long Way from Home, in which he related his own problems as a black individual in a white society. The book is considered unreliable as material for his autobiography because, for example, in it McKay denies his membership in the communist party, as McLeod points out. However, A Long Way from Home does state McKay's long-held belief that American blacks should unite in the struggle against colonialism, segregation, and oppression.

By the late 1930s McKay had developed a keen interest in Catholicism. Through Ellen Tarry, who wrote children's books, he became active in Harlem's Friendship House. His newfound religious interest, together with his observations and experiences at the Friendship House, inspired his essay collection, Harlem: Negro Metropolis, which offers an account of the black community in Harlem during the 1920s and 1930s. Like Banjo, Banana Bottom, and Gingertown, Harlem: Negro Metropolis failed to spark much interest from a reading public that was a tiring of literature by and about blacks. Critic McLeod offers a more recent evaluation of the work, the writing of which was based as much on scholarly inquiry as on personal observation, as McKay was absent from the country for a good deal of the period covered: "The book has been superseded by many more-scholarly studies, yet it retains value as a reexamination of Harlem by one who had established a necessary critical distance." With his reputation already waning, McKay moved to Chicago and worked as a teacher for a Catholic organization. By the mid-1940s his health had deteriorated. He endured several illnesses throughout his last years and eventually died of heart failure in May 1948.

In the years immediately following his death McKay's reputation continued to decline as critics found him conventional and somewhat shallow. Recently, however, McKay has gained recognition for his intense commitment to expressing the predicament of his fellow blacks, and he is now admired for devoting his art and life to social protest. As Robert A. Smith wrote in his Phylon publication, "Claude McKay: An Essay in Criticism": "Although he was frequently concerned with the race problem, his style is basically lucid. One feels disinclined to believe that the medium which he chose was too small, or too large for his message. He has been heard." McKay continues to be associated with the phenomenon known as the Harlem Renaissance, though he lived outside of the country for much of the period, and has found new audiences among readers of commonwealth literature and gay and lesbian literature. McLeod concluded his essay in Dictionary of Literary Biography with the following accolades: "That he was able to capture a universality of sentiment in 'If We Must Die' has been fully demonstrated; that he was able to show new directions for the black novel is now acknowledged; and that he is rightly regarded as one of the harbingers of (if not one of the participants in) the Harlem Renaissance is undisputed."

FURTHER READINGS:

FURTHER READINGS ABOUT THE AUTHOR:

BOOKS

African-American Almanac, sixth edition, Gale, 1994.
Bad Object Choices, editors, How Do I Look, Bay Press, 1991.
Baker, Houston A., Jr., Modernism and the Harlem Renaissance, University of Chicago Press, 1987.
Barton, Rebecca Chalmers, Witnesses for Freedom: Negro Americans in Autobiography, Harper, 1948.
Beier, Ulli, editor, Introduction to African Literature: An Anthology of Critical Writing from "Black Orpheus," Longmans, 1967.
Black Literature Criticism, Gale, 1993.
Bone, Robert, The Negro Novel in America, rev. ed., Yale University Press, 1965.
Brawley, Benjamin, The Negro Genius: A New Appraisal of the Achievement of the American Negro in Literature and the Fine Arts, Dodd, 1937.
Bronze, Stephen, Roots of Negro Consciousness, the 1920's: Three Harlem Renaissance Authors, Libra, 1964.
Brown, Lloyd W., West Indian Poetry, Twayne, 1978, pp. 39-62.
Contemporary Black Biography, Volume 6, Gale, 1994.
Conroy, Mary James, Claude McKay: Negro Poet and Novelist, University Microfilms, 1968.
Cooper, Wayne F., Claude McKay: Rebel Sojourner in the Harlem Renaissance: A Biography, Louisiana State University Press, 1987.
Dictionary of Literary Biography, Gale, Volume 4: American Writers in Paris, 1920-1939, 1980, Volume 45: American Poets, 1880-1945, First Series, 1986, Volume 51: American Writers from the Harlem Renaissance to 1940, 1987, Volume 117: Twentieth-Century Caribbean and Black African Writers, First Series, 1992.
Duberman, Martin, Martha Vicinus, and George Chauncey, Jr., editors,Hidden from History: Reclaiming the Gay and Lesbian Past, Meridian, 1989, pp. 318-31.
Emanuel, James A., and Theodore L. Gross, Dark Symphony: Negro Literature in America, Free Press, 1968.
Fullinwider, S. P., The Mind and Mood of Black America: 20th Century Thought, Dorsey, 1969.
Gayle, Addison, Jr., Claude McKay: The Black Poet at War, Broadside, 1972.
Giles, James R., Claude McKay, Twayne, 1976.
Gloster, Hugh M., Negro Voices in American Fiction, University of North Carolina Press, 1948.
Huggins, Nathan, Harlem Renaissance, Oxford University Press, 1971.
Hughes, Carl Milton, The Negro Novelist: 1940-1950, Citadel, 1953.
Kent, George E., Blackness and the Adventure of Western Culture, Third World Press, 1972, pp. 36-52.
Lang, Phyllis Martin, Claude McKay: The Later Years, 1934-48, University Microfilms, 1973.
LeSeur, Geta J., The Harlem Renaissance: Revaluations, Garland, 1989, pp. 219-31.
Lewis, David Levering, When Harlem Was in Vogue, Oxford University Press, 1981.
Magill, Frank N., editor, Masterpieces of African-American Literature, HarperCollins, 1992.
Massa, Daniel, editor, Individual and Community in Commonwealth Literature, University of Malta, 1979, pp. 75-83.
Poetry Criticism, Volume 2, Gale, 1991.
Ramchand, Kenneth, The West Indian Novel and Its Background, Barnes & Noble, 1970.
Reference Guide to American Literature, second edition, St. James Press, 1987.
Rothenberg, Paula S., editor, Race, Class and Gender in the United States, St. Martins, 1995.
Samuels, Wilfred D., Five Afro-Caribbean Voices in American Culture, 1917-1929, Belmont, 1977, pp. 61-82.
Tillery, Tyrone, Claude McKay: A Black Poet's Struggle for Identity, University of Massachusetts Press, 1992.
Twentieth-Century Literary Criticism, Gale, Volume 7, 1982, Volume 41, 1991.
Wagner, Jean, Les Poetes negres des Etats-Unis, Librairies Istra, 1962, translation by Kenneth Douglas published as Black Poets of the United States: From Paul Laurence Dunbar to Langston Hughes, University of Illinois Press, 1973, pp. 197-257.
Wolfe, Susan J., and Julia Penelope, editors, Sexual Practice, Textual Theory: Lesbian Cultural Criticism, Blackwell, 1993.
World Literature Criticism, Gale, 1992.
PERIODICALS

African American Review, fall, 1994, p. 447.
America, July 3, 1943.
American Poetry Review, number 4, 1975, pp. 40-42.
Black Orpheus, June, 1965, pp. 39-48.
Bookman, April, 1928; February, 1930.
Caribbean Quarterly, June, 1983, pp. 22-29.
CLA Journal, March, 1972, pp. 338-44, 345-53; June, 1973; December, 1975; March, 1980, pp. 336-51; September, 1986, pp. 46-58; March, 1989, pp. 296-308.
Crisis, June, 1928.
Extension, September, 1946.
Genders, spring, 1990, pp. 32-46.
Jamaica Journal, May-July, 1986, pp. 46-48.
Journal of American Culture, fall, 1991, pp. 91-96.
Journal of Commonwealth Literature, July, 1970, pp. 33-44.
Journal of Homosexuality, numbers 2-3, 1993, pp. 127-42.
Literary Half-Yearly, July, 1986, pp. 39-45, 65-75.
Negro American Literature Forum, spring, 1971, pp. 15-23.
New York Post, May 22, 1937.
Poetry, February, 1954, pp. 287-90.
Phylon, fall, 1948; fall, 1964, pp. 297-306.
Presence Africaine, first quarter, 1970, pp. 165-69.
Race, July, 1967; November, 1970, pp. 37-51.
Southern Review, number 1, 1970, pp. 53-66.
Studies in Black Literature, summer, 1972.
ONLINE

New York Times, http://www.nytimes.com/ (September 14, 2012), Felicia R. Lee, "New Novel of Harlem Renaissance Is Found."*

Lost and found: a political satire by an important Harlem Renaissance author, rejected for publication in 1941, finally appears in print 75 years later
Donna Seaman
Booklist. 113.11 (Feb. 1, 2017): p14.
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* Amiable with Big Teeth.

By Claude McKay.

Feb. 2017. 352p. Penguin, $28 (9780143107316)

The youngest of 11 children in a Jamaican farming family, Claude McKay (1889-1948) was a published poet as a teenager. After he made his way to New York, he became part of the Harlem Renaissance, even as he wrote his first three novels in France (Home to Harlem, 1928), Spain and Morocco (Banjo, 1929), and Tangier (Banana Bottom, 1933). Back in New York, he eked out a living working for the Federal Writers' Project, along with Dorothy West, Richard Wright, and Ralph Ellison, while writing articles and nonfiction books, including Harlem: Negro Metropolis (1940), the last title published before his death.

In 2009, Jean-Christophe Cloutier, a doctoral candidate and intern at Columbia University's Rare Book and Manuscript Library, came across a 300-page manuscript that he and his dissertation adviser Brent Hayes Edwards eventually authenticated as a heretofore unknown work by McKay: Amiable with Big Teeth: A Novel of the Love Affair between the Communists and the Poor Black Sheep of Harlem. The two scholars report on their findings in their fascinating introduction to the first edition of McKay's rescued fourth novel, reporting that McKay was so determined to complete the book quickly that he left the distractions of New York City for a farmhouse in Maine as soon as he received an advance from his publisher, E. P. Dutton. But when he submitted the manuscript in July 1941, Dutton declined to publish it, and with that, the paper trail came to an end, leaving unsolved the mystery of what happened to the manuscript during the difficult last years of McKay's life, as he struggled with financial woes and illness. The novel's remarkable discovery and prominent publication is a propitious event of tremendous historical and literary significance.

McKay's zealous political satire begins on a Sunday afternoon in 1934 as people fill Seventh Avenue in Harlem, galvanized to action by Mussolini's invasion of `iopia. The elite has created competing charitable organizations to raise funds for the besieged, poorly armed African nation, including Hands to Ethiopia, the brain child of Pablo Peixota, who made his fortune "in the notorious numbers game." He is proud to be hosting a young Ethiopian prince and envoy, Lij Tekla Alamaya, who catches the eager eye of Pablo's mischievous stepdaughter, Seraphine. But the church event Pablo has orchestrated is hijacked by the flamboyant Professor Koazhy, the controversial leader of a secretive group known as the Senegambians. Worse yet are Pablo's troubles with the White Friends of Ethiopia and the enigmatic, coldly manipulative Maxim Tasan, a rabid recruiter for the Communist party, which has its own warring factions.

McKay devotes a nearly stultifying number of pages to the battle between the Trotskyites and Stalinists, a hot issue then even as fascism and Nazism gathered strength overseas. Though McKay introduces intriguing characters and brings readers into enticing situations--dinner parties, clandestine meetings, and nightclub parties and confrontations, the dialogue descends into tedious diatribes. Still, this overly talky, often stilted mix of political critique and low-flame potboiler is smart, daring, and brimming with arresting insights. Such as Alamaya's outsider perspective on American racism, and Seraphine's wish: "I want to feel free to live my life like any American girl."

McKay choreographs hoaxes, betrayals, showdowns, and a highly questionable sexual encounter while tackling thorny questions about African Americans' sense of identity and heritage, interracial alliances and marriages, social class, and the impact on Harlem by global politics. The novel's provocative subtide is alluded to in a thunderous sermon by the Reverend Zebulon Trawl, in which he beseeches God: "show me the way to defeat the machinations of the strong white ones against thy poor black sheep." Many readers will relate to Pablo's response to the political turmoil dividing his community and the world at-large: "he reasoned that the times were fantastic in a way that was beyond his imagination. Principles had become meaningless."

Why was Amiable with Big Teeth rejected? Perhaps Dutton didn't want to invest in its much needed revision, or McKay wasn't willing or able to do the necessary rewrites. Dutton may also have passed on it because of the escalating war in Europe. McKay's vehement criticism of Stalin and his supporters would not have played well as the U.S. looked to the Soviet Union as an ally against Germany. Whatever the reason, now that the novel is finally, even miraculously, available, McKay will be more widely recognized as, to quote Cloutier and Edwards, "one of the most important literary and political writers of the interwar period."

McKay, Claude: AMIABLE WITH BIG TEETH
Kirkus Reviews. (Jan. 1, 2017):
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McKay, Claude AMIABLE WITH BIG TEETH Penguin (Adult Fiction) $28.00 2, 7 ISBN: 978-0-14-310731-6

Newly discovered novel by the great chronicler of the Harlem Renaissance, a sweeping satire of clashing ideologies and ambitions north of 110th Street."The time was ungodly tough for God's swarthy step-children": written in 1941, McKay's novel describes a time a few years earlier, when Harlem was alive with talk of African-American civil rights as Franklin Roosevelt entered his third term as president. The proponents of "Aframerican"--McKay's coinage--self-determination have a new cause in an Ethiopia beset by an invasion on the part of fascist Italy. As the novel opens, a certain Pablo Peixota, said to be Brazilian, is at the head of a boisterous crowd gathered to honor the arrival of an envoy from Haile Selassie's besieged throne; "the Emperor of Ethiopia had condescended," McKay writes, "to send a representative as a token of his goodwill and to give encouragement and inspiration to the efforts of the Aframericans." Most effortful of all is a strange fellow named Professor Koazhy, who arrives "bedecked in a uniform so rare, so gorgeous, it made the people prance and shout for joy." He aims, it seems, to outdo the emperor himself in splendor, but the good professor has other intentions. So, too, do the local Communists, who, seeing a political movement building, can't help but want to co-opt it: "the Hands to Ethiopia was not interesting as one means of defending Ethiopia, but only as an organization that might be captured by the Marxists to help expand the gargantuanesque inflated maw of the Popular Front." Against this backdrop of rising contention are a string of characters who, with aims ranging from the noble to the self-serving, drop in and out of the narrative. McKay writes with broad, pointed humor without resorting to lampooning, although the symbolism gets a little heavier handed as it arrives at an unexpectedly violent close. Full of now-arcane references to historical moments and political movements past but still engaging and well-paced.

"Claude McKay." Contemporary Authors Online, Gale, 2017. Literature Resource Center, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?p=LitRC&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CH1000066740&it=r&asid=6ea6ca7f805d626f7272f80e759c0dae. Accessed 9 Mar. 2017. Seaman, Donna. "Lost and found: a political satire by an important Harlem Renaissance author, rejected for publication in 1941, finally appears in print 75 years later." Booklist, 1 Feb. 2017, p. 14. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA481244728&it=r&asid=01fbc2fc1608fd30d790c126b79e3063. Accessed 9 Mar. 2017. "McKay, Claude: AMIABLE WITH BIG TEETH." Kirkus Reviews, 1 Jan. 2017. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA475357513&it=r&asid=0149f8e5ba61dd6043366bfdece0818b. Accessed 9 Mar. 2017.

• Journal Sentinel
  http://www.jsonline.com/story/entertainment/books/2017/02/03/newly-discovered-claude-mckay-novel-explores-1930s-harlem/97254574/
  Word count: 750

  Newly discovered Claude McKay novel explores 1930s Harlem
  Mike Fischer, Special to the Journal Sentinel 12:00 p.m. CT Feb. 3, 2017
  BKAMIABLE05.jpg
  (Photo: Penguin Classics)
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  When a young Claude McKay spent eight months in Moscow during the early 1920s, he joined the many artists of his generation who fell hard for communism.

  And why not? At a time when black men like McKay were being routinely lynched back home in the United States and the KKK was making significant inroads in the North, the Soviet Union promised a future of racial equality, in which all peoples would be brothers.

  McKay had lost his youthful illusions by the time he wrote his last, just-discovered novel: “Amiable With Big Teeth.” Completed in July 1941, it was rejected by McKay’s publisher and then lost, until being discovered by graduate student Jean-Christophe Cloutier in a box of Columbia University papers in 2009.

  In their informative introduction to McKay’s novel, in which they trace the parallels between the novel’s characters and actual historical figures, Cloutier and Columbia professor Brent Hayes Edwards describe its publication as “cause for celebration as well as a monumental literary event.” Given McKay’s status as a major Harlem Renaissance artist, they’re absolutely right.

  That doesn’t mean “Amiable” is a good novel; it’s not. Set in Harlem during the aftermath of Italy’s 1935 invasion of Ethiopia, it’s primarily interesting for sociological rather than aesthetic reasons.

  McKay uses Harlem’s response to Mussolini’s invasion as his backdrop for various profiles of Harlem’s elite, underscoring again what comes through in the first two of his three preceding novels, “Home to Harlem” (1928) and “Banjo” (1929): the black intelligentsia’s disconnect from the everyday lives of people on whose behalf they claimed to speak.

  One sees this tension from the first chapter, in which “animated crowds” attending a Harlem rally for Ethiopia go wild for a resplendently dressed Harlem native – decked out in an Ethiopian soldier’s traditional uniform – while giving Ethiopia’s conservatively dressed envoy a comparatively tepid welcome.

  The elite organizing the rally condemn the self-styled Professor Koazhy’s performance as “jungle burlesque” – never mind that his entertaining spectacle helps raise more money for the cause.

  The Harlem masses – seen but rarely heard in this novel – are castigated by one member of the elite as “ignorant, provincial and superstitious.” Another, more sympathetic character refers to his fellow black Americans as “a weak and vulnerable people.” His wife views the Ethiopians themselves as “barbaric.”

  Such views, shared by many characters in McKay’s novel, helps explain why some of them are attracted to Maxim Tasan, a white organizer for the Communist Party who is reminiscent of the satanic Brother Jack in Ellison’s “Invisible Man.” Maxim is the hungry, sharp-toothed wolf in sheep’s clothing suggested by McKay’s title.

  In a book with many clunky and protracted political discussions, Maxim is prone to abstract theorizing like this:

  “For these are times when people must be converted or compelled to mass thinking so that engineers of the new world order can obtain the maximum of mass action.”

  Even Maxim’s abstractions go down easier than the novel’s purple prose. Here’s an illustrative example from a melodramatic love subplot:

  “Seraphine’s impulsive action had struck like a gravedigger’s shovel into an old coffin and pitched her mother back into the Gethsemane of her maidenhood, overwhelming her with agony.”

  Seraphine is among the many characters in “Amiable” drawn into Maxim’s orbit; McKay is at his best in capturing the appeal of his Popular Front ideology, for reasons having little to do with Maxim himself.

  In a context where Stalin’s murderous policies were still largely unknown or disbelieved, and in which thugs like Mussolini could blithely destroy a black nation like Ethiopia while the white world looked away, Moscow seemed to offer a genuine, populist alternative.

  McKay ultimately rejected this Soviet path for much the same reason this novel’s two most appealing characters do: As Maxim’s dicta makes clear, the Stalinist brand of communism offered little room for individual expression – or for variations of the same such as race pride. McKay consistently championed both.

• New York Times
  http://www.nytimes.com/2012/09/15/books/harlem-renaissance-novel-by-claude-mckay-is-discovered.html
  Word count: 1232

  New Novel of Harlem Renaissance Is Found
  By FELICIA R. LEESEPT. 14, 2012
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  A Columbia graduate student and his adviser have authenticated the student’s discovery of an unknown manuscript of a 1941 novel by Claude McKay, a leading Harlem Renaissance writer and author of the first novel by a black American to become a best seller.

  The manuscript, “Amiable With Big Teeth: A Novel of the Love Affair Between the Communists and the Poor Black Sheep of Harlem,” was discovered in a previously untouched university archive and offers an unusual window on the ideas and events (like Mussolini’s invasion of Ethiopia) that animated Harlem on the cusp of World War II. The two scholars have received permission from the McKay estate to publish the novel, a satire set in 1936, with an introduction about how it was found and its provenance verified.

  McKay, a Jamaican-born writer and political activist who died in 1948, at 58 (though some biographies say 57), influenced a generation of black writers, including Langston Hughes. His work includes the 1919 protest poem “If We Must Die,” (quoted by Winston Churchill) and “Harlem Shadows,” a 1922 poetry collection that some critics say ushered in the Harlem Renaissance. He also wrote the 1928 best-selling novel “Home to Harlem.” But his last published fiction during his lifetime was the 1933 novel “Banana Bottom.”

  “This is a major discovery,” said Henry Louis Gates Jr., the Harvard University scholar, who was one of three experts called upon to examine the novel and supporting research. “It dramatically expands the canon of novels written by Harlem Renaissance writers and, obviously, novels by Claude McKay.

  Photo

  The author Claude McKay in the 1920s. Credit Corbis
  “More important, because it was written in the second half of the Harlem Renaissance, it shows that the renaissance continued to be vibrant and creative and turned its focus to international issues — in this case the tensions between Communists, on the one hand, and black nationalists, on the other, for the hearts and minds of black Americans,” said Mr. Gates, the director of the W. E. B. Du Bois Institute for African and African American Research at Harvard.

  Continue reading the main story
  This literary detective story began in the summer of 2009, when Jean-Christophe Cloutier, a doctoral candidate in English and comparative literature, was working as an intern in the Rare Book and Manuscript Library at Columbia. He was going through more than 50 boxes of materials belonging to Samuel Roth, a kind of literary pariah who died in 1974 and is best known for being the appellant in a famous obscenity case in the 1950s.

  Mr. Roth is also known for publishing work without permission, including excerpts from James Joyce’s “Ulysses” and editions of “Lady Chatterley’s Lover,” by D. H. Lawrence. Mr. Roth attended Columbia, and his family donated his collection to the university.

  No one knew of a connection between Mr. Roth and McKay, Mr. Cloutier said, as he came upon the roughly 300-page double-spaced manuscript, bound between cardboardlike covers bearing the novel’s title and McKay’s name. He also found two letters from McKay to Mr. Roth about possibly ghostwriting a novel to be called “Descent Into Harlem,” about an Italian immigrant who settles in Harlem.

  “Amiable” is a different story, though, rife with political intrigue, romance, seedy nightclubs and scenes of black intellectual and artistic life in Harlem during the Great Depression.

  Photo

  The Columbia graduate student Jean-Christophe Cloutier, left, with Prof. Brent Hayes Edwards. Credit Robert Caplin for The New York Times
  Mr. Cloutier quickly took his discovery to Brent Hayes Edwards, his dissertation adviser and an expert in black literature. Mr. Edwards, a professor of English and comparative literature at Columbia, knew that McKay had published three novels during his lifetime (including “Banjo,” in 1929.) A novella, “Harlem Glory: A Fragment Of Aframerican Life,” was published posthumously).

  But he and Mr. Cloutier immediately found in “Amiable” themes that recurred across McKay’s work, like Communism and labor strikes in Harlem, and characters, like the real-life labor leader Sufi Abdul Hamid. The term “Aframerican,” which McKay used to refer to black people in the Western Hemisphere, also appeared in “Amiable.”

  Mr. Cloutier and Mr. Edwards gathered additional evidence by rummaging through archives at libraries around the country, including at Yale, Indiana University, Emory University and the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, part of the New York Public Library (which manages the McKay estate).

  They ended up amassing a mountain of archival and circumstantial evidence pointing to McKay’s authorship. But it was the extensive correspondence between McKay and his friend Max Eastman, the writer, political activist and avid supporter of the Harlem Renaissance, that ultimately convinced them that “Amiable” was indeed McKay’s, they said.

  “The irrefutable archival evidence we have is when Eastman directly quotes from the novel,” Mr. Cloutier said. “McKay sent him pages, all from the summer of 1941 and a bit later.” (They also found letters referring to a contract between McKay and E. P. Dutton to write the novel.)

  Photo

  The manuscript of the novel by McKay that was found. Credit Robert Caplin for The New York Times
  The authentication of the novel is “scholarly gold,” said William J. Maxwell, the editor of “Complete Poems: Claude McKay.” Its mocking portraits of Communists show McKay’s decisive break with Communism and his effort to turn his political evolution into art, said Mr. Maxwell, a professor of English and African-American Studies at Washington University in St. Louis.

  Moreover, while the flowering of arts known as the Harlem Renaissance obsessively documented black life in the 1920s, he said, far less is known about the period of the 1930s, focused on in “Amiable.”

  Many scholars believe that the Harlem Renaissance’s creative energy had pretty much run out by the late 1930s. But Mr. Edwards said he believed that “Amiable” would eventually be recognized “as the key political novel of the black intellectual life in New York in the late 1930s.”

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  McKay represents the Communists as amiable with big teeth, he said, but they end up being a “wolf in sheep’s clothing.”

  “I cannot think of another novel that gives us such a rich and multilayered portrayal of black life,” Mr. Edwards continued. “There are scenes with artists in salons, in nightclubs, in queer nightclubs. It has almost a documentary aspect.”

  Despite his moment in the spotlight, Mr. Cloutier is still in the middle of his dissertation, which he expects to complete in 2013 or 2014. Its title? “Archival Vagabonds: 20th Century American Fiction and the Archives in Novelistic Practice.” And the McKay manuscript remains where Mr. Cloutier found it, now archived in Box 29, Folders 7 and 8, of the Samuel Roth papers.

• Time
  http://time.com/4657651/claude-mckay-amiable-with-big-teeth/
  Word count: 519

  A Found Novel of Harlem Works As a Time Capsule
  Sarah Begley
  Feb 02, 2017
  Sarah Begley is a staff writer for TIME.
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  3/9/2017 Review: Claude McKay's Amiable With Big Teeth | Time.com
  http://time.com/4657651/claude­mckay­amiable­with­big­teeth/ 2/11
  McKay's editor turned the book down in 1941; it appears now almost exactly as it was drafted. The story
  could have used tightening, but it's a shame for McKay's contemporaries that it was passed over. For us, it's a
  lucky treat.
  Claude McKay (1889--1948) has long been considered one of the great authors of the Harlem Renaissance. He
  wrote novels such as Home to Harlem (1928) and Banana Bottom (1933) as well as poetry, memoirs and a
  major cultural biography, Harlem: Negro Metropolis. Scholars and admirers now have a new piece of the
  oeuvre to admire: 69 years after his death, Penguin Classics is publishing a McKay manuscript, Amiable With
  Big Teeth, found by a student in the Columbia University archives in 2009, making it just one in a recent slew
  of works by dead authors seeing the light of day for the first time.
  Late last year, a posthumous collection of short stories by the filmmaker Kathleen Collins came out after
  sitting in a steamer trunk for decades; an unfinished Mark Twain story will be published as a children's book
  in September; the Strand magazine (which has made a cottage industry out of such finds) recently put out a
  previously unpublished H.G. Wells story; and Beatrix Potter fans got a new children's book from the Peter
  Rabbit author last year after it was discovered in the Victoria and Albert Museum archives.
  Amiable With Big Teeth lives up to McKay's reputation. The book satirizes life in Harlem during the 1935
  Italian invasion of Ethiopia, when "Aframericans" (the Jamaica-born author's term) rose up in support of
  Ethiopians. He was taking aim at the white communists who tried to infiltrate pro-Ethiopia groups to win
  support for their cause, manipulating the "poor black sheep of Harlem" without caring about their problems.
  Socialites, intellectuals and hucksters debate the conflict abroad from the parlors and churches of Harlem,
  while communists picket to "Make Harlem safe for Soviet Russia." McKay mocks both sides, but he knows the
  stakes: "If a native state can maintain its existence in Africa and hold its head up among the white nations,"
  one character says, "it adds to the self-respect of the colored Americans."
  McKay enjoyed support from the Federal Writers' Project, a New Deal program that gave him a paycheck and
  access to rich sociological archives. (Other participants included Ralph Ellison and Zora Neale Hurston.) It's
  thanks in part to that project that we now have this time capsule of a novel.
  TIME Ideas hosts the world's leading voices, providing commentary on events in news, society, and culture. We welcome outside
  contributions. Opinions expressed do not necessarily reflect the views of TIME editors

• Paste
  https://www.pastemagazine.com/articles/2017/02/claude-mckay-amiable-with-big-teeth.html
  Word count: 1930

  Claude McKay's Amiable with Big Teeth: How a Hidden Manuscript's Discovery Brings 1930s Harlem to Life
  By Steve Nathans-Kelly | February 10, 2017 | 3:17pm
  Author photo by Carl Van Vechten / The Van Vechten Trust / Beinecke Library at Yale
  BOOKS FEATURES CLAUDE MCKAY
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  Claude McKay's Amiable with Big Teeth: How a Hidden Manuscript's Discovery Brings 1930s Harlem to Life
  On a summer day in 2009, graduate student Jean-Christophe Cloutier stumbled upon an unpublished novel’s manuscript in the Columbia University archives. The manuscript’s author? Claude McKay, a celebrated poet and novelist of the Harlem Renaissance. Cloutier’s miraculous find must have seemed too good to be true considering where he found it—in the unprocessed papers of Samuel Roth, a sometime-poet, renegade publisher, notorious literary bootlegger and defendant in one of the most consequential obscenity cases ever to reach the Supreme Court. Though a champion of modernist writers, Roth had no known connection with McKay. But there, among Roth’s motley assortment of prison letters, legal documents, family photos, pin-up posters and racy etchings, sat an undiscovered treasure under a faded title page bearing the legend: “AMIABLE WITH BIG TEETH, A novel of the Love Affair Between the Communists and the Poor Black Sheep of Harlem by Claude McKay, Author of HOME TO HARLEM.”

  Cloutier had unearthed a scathing political satire rich in historical detail, razor-sharp commentary and vivid characters, written in 1941 but published for the first time this week. As the nearly eight-year interval between the novel’s discovery and its eventual arrival in print suggests, Amiable with Big Teeth’s journey to publication had a few twists and turns.

  Authenticating Amiable

  When he first encountered the manuscript in 2009, Cloutier didn’t entirely grasp the significance of what he’d found. Now an Assistant Professor of English at the University of Pennsylvania, at the time Cloutier was working toward his Ph.D. and serving as a paid intern in the archives, tasked with organizing and annotating Roth’s 54 boxes of papers. Cloutier assumed he’d found an early manuscript of a book later published under a different title. He reported it to his advisor, Brent Hayes Edwards, a Columbia English professor with a specialty in African-American and African diaspora literature.

  “He brought it to me because he knew I knew McKay and had written on McKay,” Edwards says in an interview with Paste. “‘I’d never heard of it.”

  At that moment, the detective work began. Because no McKay book with that title (or anything resembling it) had ever appeared in publication, or even received a mention in a McKay biography, the manuscript raised as many questions as answers. The quest to authenticate it—to prove beyond reasonable doubt that it was, indeed, a lost McKay novel—took Edwards and Cloutier to numerous archives from Cambridge to Atlanta in search of letters, documents, records, anything that would fill in the story behind this lost novel by a major modernist author now 60 years dead.

  Eventually, a letter to McKay from longtime friend and colleague Max Eastman—saying “I’m perfectly delighted with your book” and quoting passages from the manuscript they’d found—identified Amiable as a novel written for and rejected by publisher E.F. Dutton in 1941. But it took multiple summers to crack the case.

  “I’d done a lot of research on McKay’s time in France in the late ‘20s and McKay in Morocco in the early ‘30s. I’d read through all his correspondence from that period,” Edwards says. “I had never paid much attention to the letters he was writing in the spring of 1941. We didn’t find those letters until we started trying to document when he wrote this and prove that he did it.”

  Edwards and Cloutier announced the manuscript’s authenticity in September 2012, following a thorough review of their research by three experts in the field. At that time, one of those experts, Harvard University scholar Henry Louis Gates, Jr., proclaimed Amiable with Big Teeth a “major discovery [that] dramatically expands the canon of novels written by Harlem Renaissance writers and, obviously, novels by Claude McKay.”

  McKay’s Controversial Early Novels

  McKay is perhaps best known outside of modern literary circles for his 1919 sonnet “If We Must Die”—as succinct and enduring a declaration of defiance to racial subjugation as any ever written in America. He stands among the most accomplished—and contentious—figures of the Harlem Renaissance, a period in the 1920s and ‘30s in which the emergence of a talented generation of (mostly) American writers and artists of African descent coincided with an explosion of white attraction to the perceived primitivism of Jazz Age Harlem. This confluence led to unprecedented patronage for black artists, opportunities cynically—if accurately—characterized by McKay as the “Negro vogue.”

  1claudemckayphoto.jpgAs a Harlem Renaissance author, McKay is difficult to pigeonhole. Throughout his body of work and his career as an artist and a public figure, McKay’s ideas about politics and racial solidarity proved far more complex and controversial than “If We Must Die” might suggest.

  McKay’s most commercially successful novel, Home to Harlem (1928), dazzled readers with its rendering of Harlem’s frenzied nightlife and the tensions among black Pullman porters working on long-haul trains. Though now canonized alongside the celebrated fiction of contemporaries Zora Neale Hurston, Nella Larsen, Jean Toomer and Langston Hughes, Home to Harlem drew harsh criticism early on from a number of African-American critics, among them Souls of Black Folk author W.E.B. DuBois. The NAACP co-founder argued that McKay’s hedonistic protagonist reinforced negative stereotypes of African-American men, declaring that reading Home to Harlem left him feeling “distinctly unclean and in need of a bath.”

  “The scandal of Home to Harlem in 1928 is that most people in what became known as the Harlem Renaissance were choosing protagonists who were lawyers or doctors, very genteel or educated,” Cloutier explains in an interview with Paste. “But [McKay] was more interested in depicting what he called the ‘underworld’ of Harlem, so he was going against the grain.”

  Critics hoping for more “genteel” images of African-American life had little use for Banjo, McKay’s second novel and arguably his finest work, which came out the following year. Banjo delivered a portrait of transnational brotherhood among sailors, dockworkers and jazz musicians in 1920s France, revealing ugly truths about racism McKay had experienced firsthand in Marseilles. In some ways akin to a Pan-African Cannery Row, the novel highlighted a cross-cultural underclass cobbling together a community in which they could debate their political differences and make art.

  McKay’s last published novel, the Jamaican-themed Banana Bottom, appeared in 1933 with little commercial success. “I have always been puzzled that he stopped writing fiction,” Edwards says. “That was the narrative we had [before Amiable with Big Teeth]. I knew he got sick in the 1940s. I knew there were other things going on, but it just seemed odd to me that someone who was so clearly a committed fiction writer would just drop the form in the last 15 years of his life.”

  McKay Comes Home to Harlem

  McKay originally hailed from Jamaica and briefly lived in Harlem before writing his three published novels abroad, returning in 1934 to a waning Harlem Renaissance. His most popular publication in the following years was an autobiography appropriately titled A Long Way From Home (1937), but the majority of his post-Banjo books never sold well. McKay eked out a modest living penning a column in the Harlem weekly Amsterdam News; writing political pieces for various periodicals; and by qualifying for a position on the government-subsidized Federal Writers Project (FWP) beginning in 1936.

  “Like most blacks on the [FWP],” writes McKay biographer Wayne F. Cooper in his 1987 biography Claude McKay: Rebel Sojourner in the Harlem Rennaissance, “he concentrated on the contemporary history of New York’s black population.” The FWP work found for McKay researching dozens of biographical sketches on “notable Harlemites,” engaging him with the local political currents of the era.

  “During his years with the FWP,” Cooper writes, “[McKay] also wrote several articles in which he clearly stated his position on a variety of interrelated contemporary issues, ranging from communism and the Popular Front to the present and future of blacks within American society.”

  “It is in these articles and editorials that McKay first begins to articulate what becomes the increasingly fervent anti-communist stance that is a key feature of his late career,” Cloutier and Edwards write in the introduction to Amiable with Big Teeth.

  During this time, McKay organized fellow writers of the waning Harlem Renaissance into a Negro Writers Guild. But his efforts were met with resistance from the Communist Party, which pushed for integrated organizations emphasizing class solidarity over racial identity, and placing little importance on black leadership.

  These concerns come front and center in McKay’s Harlem: Negro Metropolis, a collection of essays published shortly before he began writing Amiable with Big Teeth. But it’s in Amiable that his anti-communist writing really catches fire.

  Enter Amiable with Big Teeth, Harlem Roman à Clef

  “Ostensibly about the complex world-historical dynamics involved in the emergence of the ‘Aid-to-Ethiopia’ organizations in Harlem during the Italo-Abyssinian crisis,” Cloutier wrote in a 2013 issue of MODERNISM/modernity, “Amiable is McKay’s most realized literary expression of his desire for greater group unity among African Americans.”

  1amiableteethcover.jpgThe novel begins at a flashpoint in this crisis, when two aid-to-Ethiopia organizations battle for the hearts and minds of concerned Harlemites. From the opening scene, a fictionalized version of a massive Ethiopian aid rally held at Harlem’s Abyssinian Baptist Church in 1935, McKay weaves fact and gripping invention. On one side of Amiable’s conflict stands the black-run Hands to Ethiopia, chaired by Pablo Peixota, a dedicated community leader and former numbers runner now the owner of legitimate businesses in Harlem. Allied with Peixota are fellow Harlemite Dorsey Flagg and Lij Tekla Alamaya, an Ethiopian envoy with a letter of introduction from the embattled Emperor.

  Hands to Ethiopia’s efforts are undermined by the novel’s villain, Maxim Tasan of the White Friends of Ethiopia, a front organization for the Communist-allied Popular Front. As the story unfolds, the novel expands to encompass subterfuge, romance, the surprise appearance of an Ethiopian princess and an array of soapbox speeches in disparate voices.

  As a roman à clef written just a few years after the period it covers, Amiable with Big Teeth reflects that era with an intimacy impossible to capture in a later time—a miraculous feat for a book discovered seven decades later. Questions remain as to why it never saw the light of day for 70 years, and those questions may never be answered. Yet it inevitably recasts the narrative of Claude McKay’s later years—altering our understanding of a novelist who seemingly wrote his last novel 15 years before his death—and it’s a satisfying rewrite. The McKay of Amiable with Big Teeth “was a fiction writer coming home to one of his main modes,” Edwards says. “He’s one of the towering novelists of that period. It’s not surprising that he went back to his novels.”

  Steve Nathans-Kelly is a writer and editor based in Ithaca, New York.

• Crimson
  http://www.thecrimson.com/article/2017/2/7/amiable-with-big-teeth-review/
  Word count: 631

  'Amiable with Big Teeth,' Newly Discovered Time Capsule
  By MILA GAUVIN II, CRIMSON STAFF WRITER February 7, 2017
  0
  Amiable with Big Teeth
  "Amiable with Big Teeth" by Claude McKay COURTESY OF PENGUIN PUBLISHING GROUP
  When a Columbia graduate student discovered Harlem Renaissance writer Claude McKay’s final novel, the world enthusiastically and gratefully accepted “Amiable with Big Teeth” into the literary canon. Set in Harlem in the 1930s, “Amiable with Big Teeth” explores the strained relationships between black Americans trying to aid Ethiopia after Mussolini’s invasion and white Communists using the cause to further their own. The novel is a testament to the racial tension and political scheming of the time. Claude McKay’s “Amiable with Big Teeth” is a satirical goldmine, a time capsule that encompasses a political labyrinth of treachery present in Harlem in the 1930s.
  “Amiable with Big Teeth” centers around the divide in New York between the Communists and black patriots as they vied for the allegiance of Harlem’s African Americans. When an Ethiopian prince, Lij Alamaya, is sent by his nation’s government to gather African Americans for his country’s cause, he unknowingly puts himself in the middle of a tug-of-war between two enemy parties. While the Hands to Ethiopia, led by black leader Pablo Peixota, are trying to rally African Americans [toward][AROUND] the cause of the Ethiopians, the White Friends of Ethiopia, led by Maxim Tasan, are trying to pull them into the clutches of the Communist Party. For his own benefit, Tasan uses the Ethiopian cause to entice them. The novel thus pits black people against white people, patriotism against communism, and selflessness against egocentrism. Furthermore, McKay’s genuine depiction of Harlem emphasizes the novel’s sincerity. “Harlem is the stamping ground of false prophets,” mourns a character. “Amiable with Big Teeth” is indeed a tableau of the northern part of Manhattan. The setting for parades, parties, and protests, Harlem stands out as the heart and home of the story.

  McKay’s characters encapsulate the driving force behind the satire by being effectively one-note. McKay’s contemporaries might not have appreciated hiss characters as much had the novel been published at the time because the characterizations would have been too simple and obvious to them, for they would have a clear understanding of what Harlem was like. But for today’s time, they are the perfect exemplars to illustrate the complexity of Harlem’s situation. Indeed, McKay uses simplicity to depict complexity. Each character is either good, bad, or lost, and each is so particularly recognizable in their being that the book clearly demarcates the different types of people and ideologies that might have existed in the 30s. Lij Alamaya is the Ethiopian emperor’s envoy to the United States; loyal to his country and passionate about his cause, he is initially too naive to understand the new society he is in. Seraphine is a giddy young woman trying to navigate both her romantic life and racial identity. Peixota is the fervent, self-sacrificing believer in the cause. Maxim Tasan is the duplicitous self-serving snake.

  “Amiable with Big Teeth” undeniably enriches the literary world. Not only is it renowned author Claude McKay’s final novel, it also serves as a poignant time capsule capable of transporting those who want to be immersed in a world they may never have heard of. It reveals the politics behind protests, underlines enduring racial tensions of the time, and establishes the climate in Harlem in the years leading up to World War II. With his vividly described characters and setting, McKay depicts a vanished time that remains relevant today.

  —Staff writer Mila Gauvin II can be reached at mila.gauvin@thecrimson.com

• Atlantic
  https://www.theatlantic.com/entertainment/archive/2017/03/a-forgotten-novel-reveals-a-forgotten-harlem/518364/
  Word count: 1765

  A Forgotten Novel Reveals a Forgotten Harlem
  Discovered 70 years after it was written, Claude McKay’s Amiable With Big Teeth depicts an overlooked time in African American history when communism and black nationalism found themselves entangled.

  A vendor shows his wares at a bookstall on 125th Street in Harlem, New York, in June 1943.Corbis / Getty Images
  JENNIFER WILSON 9:00 AM ET CULTURE
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  In 1922, the Jamaican-born writer Claude McKay published Harlem Shadows, a landmark book of poetry that helped usher in the Harlem Renaissance. Though McKay was a literary celebrity in the New York neighborhood, his life and art were in many ways defined by a kind of nomadism. His interest in both black diasporas and communism led him to the waterfronts of Marseille and Morocco, and to Moscow. It’s this experience that eventually led McKay to write his newly discovered novel Amiable With Big Teeth, which takes on the tensions between black nationalism and more globally minded approaches to solidarity that reached a fever pitch in the 1930s.

  Written over 70 years ago but published just last month, the novel revolves around the Second Italo-Ethiopian War, in which Benito Mussolini’s troops invaded, and went on to occupy, Ethiopia in the mid-1930s. Watching from across the Atlantic, many African Americans saw Italy’s military campaign as a direct attack on black sovereignty by a white imperial power. But some communist sympathizers in the U.S., most of whom were white, tried to reframe the conflict as not being about race at all. They believed it was instead about the rising threat of global fascism and urged black Americans to align themselves with left-wing movements abroad and with the Soviet Union.

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  This debate about the value of communist internationalism over black nationalism is at the core of Amiable With Big Teeth. Written at a time when most scholars thought that black cultural production had come to a grinding halt as a result of the Great Depression (and the consequent dip in arts patronage), Amiable With Big Teeth provides unparalleled insight into this relatively understudied moment in black American history. But the novel, and the picture of Harlem political culture it offers, came dangerously close to being lost to history altogether. Written in 1941, it was only unearthed in 2009 when a graduate student named Jean-Christophe Cloutier came across the manuscript by accident while doing research at Columbia University. Now an assistant professor of English at the University of Pennsylvania, Cloutier told me that he could assure readers “it was worth the wait.”

  What excites Cloutier about Amiable With Big Teeth is that, despite its focus on global political intrigue, the story operates at a surprisingly compact and hyper-local scale. At its core, McKay’s text is essentially about fundraising: The novel revolves around a fictional black-led charity called Hands to Ethiopia that’s looking to raise money to supply Ethiopian soldiers with more weapons to defend themselves against Mussolini’s troops. Some of the familiar haunts of Harlem Renaissance literature are present—nightclubs, brownstones, and black society parties. But most of the drama of Amiable With Big Teeth unfolds in settings more evocative of community organizing than of the lives of uptown literati—in places like church basements, living rooms, and the cramped and chaotic offices of a non-profit.

  The fundraising efforts of Hands to Ethiopia quickly become complicated when a mysterious Russian interlocutor named Maxim Tasan enters the picture. A black member of the charity essentially becomes Tasan’s mole and encourages the organization to open itself to white members and to expel Trotskyites. At the time, the Russian Communist Leon Trotsky was living in Mexico City to avoid political payback from Stalin; after challenging Stalin’s rise to head of the Bolshevik Party, Trotsky was perceived by many Communist stalwarts to be a traitor who had made the party vulnerable to fractious dissent. But to the humble leader of Hands to Ethiopia, a fascinating character by the name of Pablo Peixota (an Afro-Brazilian turned Harlem numbers-runner), this anti-Trotskyite campaign is an over-complication of what is essentially a matter of race. For Peixota, the so-called “Italo-Abyssinian crisis” is about “one little black nation, single-handed, almost unarmed, fighting against a mighty white nation.”

  Many African Americans were suspicious of whether the Soviets fully grasped the intricacies of race in the United States.
  Brent Hayes Edwards, a professor of English and comparative literature at Columbia University, who co-edited the manuscript with Cloutier, told me the global dimensions of Amiable With Big Teeth are in many ways a response to how World War I shaped black American consciousness. African American servicemen returned from abroad with a newfound “international viewpoint,” Edwards said. That global outlook motivated black Americans to become increasingly involved in the issues facing people of African descent worldwide. Of particular focus for black Americans was defending independent black nation-states—countries like Haiti, Liberia, and Ethiopia—from white Euro-American occupation. As Edwards explained, black sovereignty, or “the idea of black people defining their own destinies,” was “a big deal” at the time McKay was writing Amiable With Big Teeth.

  In the introduction to the novel, Cloutier and Edwards quote McKay’s 1940 anthropological work, Harlem: Negro Metropolis, in which McKay explains the anxieties that animate much of the story: “Harlem [in the late 1930s] was overrun with white communists who promoted themselves as the only leader of the Negroes. They were converting a few Negroes into Bolshevik propagandists, but they were actually doing nothing to help alleviate the social misery of the Negroes.” McKay is referring to Soviet Russia’s propaganda campaign against the United States, which, during the Cold War, was partially directed toward exposing the nature of race relations in America. For instance, the Soviet press extensively covered the case of the Scottsboro Boys, and the Bolsheviks even sent money to aid in their legal defense.

  Still, many African Americans, even those who believed in the economic principles of communism, were suspicious of whether the Soviets fully grasped the intricacies of race in the United States. As the author Zora Neale Hurston once put it, “What the hen-fire could Russia do for us?” This skepticism manifests in Amiable With Big Teeth when Maxim Tasan tries to convert Pablo Peixota’s daughter, Seraphine, to his cause by telling her that Russians don’t believe in race. He cites the fame of Alexander Pushkin, often called the father of Russian literature, whose maternal great-grandfather was from Eritrea (though Tasan says Ethiopia and indeed, this fact is disputed between the two countries) as proof of Soviet Russia’s legacy of color-blindness. When Tasan proudly tells Seraphine that Pushkin’s descendants were known as “Russians, not Russafricans,” she can’t help but interpret what they’re doing as “passing”—pretending not to be black and thus shamefully denying their heritage. The scene speaks to the friction and misunderstandings that McKay and Hurston believed plagued Soviet messaging on race relations.

  Amiable With Big Teeth is a master key to the intersection of race and global revolutionary politics.
  McKay’s critique of Russian communism was especially noteworthy given his earlier commitment to the Soviet cause. In 1922, McKay spoke as an unofficial representative of the “American Negro” at the Fourth Congress of the Communist International in Moscow, which also coincided with the fifth anniversary of the Russian Revolution. He wrote about his experiences in a 1923 issue of the NAACP magazine The Crisis, in an essay titled “Soviet Russia and the Negro.” In Moscow, he spoke with hopefulness about the Soviet Union’s potential to serve as a global beacon for racial equality, citing Russia’s own racial makeup as a country whose geopolitical position created a nation “where all the races of Europe and Asia meet and mix.” McKay’s eventual disillusionment with the Soviet Union is well documented in his personal correspondence, but Amiable With Big Teeth represents a thorough artistic rendering of black disappointment with Soviet communism.

  For a work so rooted in international politics and full of non-American characters, Amiable With Big Teeth has the surprising distinction of being the only novel McKay ever wrote on American soil. (He toiled away on it while holed up in a cabin in Maine, “up here where it is cold and bracing,” he told a friend.) Despite his centrality to the Harlem Renaissance, McKay spent much of the period when that movement flourished abroad, in Western Europe, Morocco, and, of course, in Moscow. McKay’s contribution to the Harlem Renaissance was his decidedly global pan-African outlook.

  From his first book of poems, 1912’s Songs to Jamaica (which was written in Jamaican patois) to his 1929 novel Banjo, which chronicled the lives of Senegalese dock workers in Marseille, McKay’s oeuvre captured a multi-lingual black diaspora interested in forging a global identity beyond the “Back to Africa” nationalist rhetoric of Marcus Garvey (whose followers are satirized in Amiable With Big Teeth). In that regard, Amiable With Big Teeth is typical of McKay’s writing style, which was conversational in nature, and conveyed obsession through dialogue and debate. According to Edwards, McKay’s novels were “less about psychological interiority and more about ... black people from around the world arguing about what they have in common.”

  As a creative work and a historical document, Amiable With Big Teeth is nothing short of a master key into a world where the intersection of race and global revolutionary politics plays out in the lives of characters who are as dynamic and fully realized as the novel itself. The story offers a front-row seat to the polemics that drove (and stymied) black radical organizing in the 1930s. Given that the novel lived on the dusty shelves of Columbia University’s library for decades, we’ll never know how Amiable With Big Teeth would have been received at the time it was written, and if its skepticism regarding Russia would have complicated the reception of Richard Wright’s pro-communist 1940 novel Native Son. But for today’s audience, McKay’s last novel should make for fascinating and timely reading as Americans enter an era in which solidarity-building across racial identities and national borders feels more necessary, and perhaps more difficult to achieve, than ever.

• Star Tribune
  http://www.startribune.com/review-amiable-with-big-teeth-by-claude-mckay/413603933/
  Word count: 777

  Review: 'Amiable With Big Teeth,' by Claude McKay
  FICTION: This newly discovered novel by a Harlem Renaissance author is valuable more for its history than its literary merit.
  By mike fischer Milwaukee Journal Sentinel FEBRUARY 13, 2017 — 11:08AM
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  “Amiable With Big Teeth” by Claude McKay, Penguin Classics (352 pages, $28)
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  When a young Claude McKay spent eight months in Moscow during the early 1920s, he joined the many artists of his generation who fell hard for communism.

  And why not? At a time when black men like McKay were being routinely lynched back home in the United States and the KKK was making significant inroads in the North, the Soviet Union promised a future of racial equality, in which all peoples would be brothers.

  McKay had lost his youthful illusions by the time he wrote his last, just-discovered novel: "Amiable With Big Teeth." Completed in July 1941, it was rejected by McKay's publisher and then lost, until 2009, when it was discovered by graduate student Jean-Christophe Cloutier in a box of Columbia University papers.

  In their informative introduction to McKay's novel, in which they trace the parallels between the novel's characters and actual historical figures, Cloutier and Columbia professor Brent Hayes Edwards describe its publication as "cause for celebration as well as a monumental literary event." Given McKay's status as a major Harlem Renaissance artist, they're absolutely right.

  That doesn't mean "Amiable" is a good novel; it's not. Set in Harlem during the aftermath of Italy's 1935 invasion of Ethiopia, it's primarily interesting for sociological rather than aesthetic reasons.

  McKay uses Harlem's response to Mussolini's invasion as his backdrop for various profiles of Harlem's elite, underscoring again what comes through in the first two of his three preceding novels, "Home to Harlem" (1928) and "Banjo" (1929): the black intelligentsia's disconnect from the everyday lives of people on whose behalf they claimed to speak.

  Amiable With Big Teeth

  By: Claude McKay.

  Publisher: Penguin Books, 300 pages, $28.

  Coming Sunday: A review of “High Noon,” by Glenn Frankel.

  One sees this tension from the first chapter, in which "animated crowds" attending a Harlem rally for Ethiopia go wild for a resplendently dressed Harlem native — decked out in an Ethiopian soldier's traditional uniform — while giving Ethiopia's conservatively dressed envoy a comparatively tepid welcome.

  The elite organizing the rally condemn the self-styled Professor Koazhy's performance as "jungle burlesque" — never mind that his entertaining spectacle helps raise more money for the cause.

  The Harlem masses — seen but rarely heard in this novel — are castigated by one member of the elite as "ignorant, provincial and superstitious." Another, more sympathetic character refers to his fellow black Americans as "a weak and vulnerable people." His wife views the Ethiopians themselves as "barbaric."

  Such views, shared by many characters in McKay's novel, help explain why some of them are attracted to Maxim Tasan, a white organizer for the Communist Party who is reminiscent of the satanic Brother Jack in Ellison's "Invisible Man." Maxim is the hungry, sharp-toothed wolf in sheep's clothing suggested by McKay's title.

  Abstract theorizing

  In a book with many clunky and protracted political discussions, Maxim is prone to abstract theorizing like this:

  "For these are times when people must be converted or compelled to mass thinking so that engineers of the new world order can obtain the maximum of mass action."

  Even Maxim's abstractions go down easier than the novel's purple prose. Here's an illustrative example from a melodramatic love subplot:

  "Seraphine's impulsive action had struck like a gravedigger's shovel into an old coffin and pitched her mother back into the Gethsemane of her maidenhood, overwhelming her with agony."

  Seraphine is among the many characters in "Amiable" drawn into Maxim's orbit; McKay is at his best in capturing the appeal of his Popular Front ideology, for reasons having little to do with Maxim himself.

  In a context where Stalin's murderous policies were still largely unknown or disbelieved, and in which thugs like Mussolini could blithely destroy a black nation like Ethiopia while the white world looked away, Moscow seemed to offer a genuine, populist alternative.

  McKay ultimately rejected this Soviet path for much the same reason this novel's two most appealing characters do: As Maxim's dicta makes clear, the Stalinist brand of communism offered little room for individual expression — or for variations of the same such as race pride. McKay consistently championed both.

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