Claude McKay, who is considered one of the great American authors, wrote during the Harlem Renaissance period. Particularly, in his/her work(s) titled “if we must die” written in 1919 we can see evidence of the characteristics, themes and styles identified with the Harlem Renaissance which was extant in American letter between 1889 and 1948. As a representative of such movement, Claude McKay then remains one of the most identifiable and iconic writers of his/her time.
My authors name is Claude McKay; he spent most of his time as an author, journalist, and poet. He was born on September 15, 1889 and died on May 22,1948. He was born in sunny Ville, Clarendon parish, Jamaica and died of a heart attack later in Chicago, Illinois. He studied poetry and philosophy with Englishman Walter Jekyll, who encouraged him to begin producing poetry in his own Jamaican dialect. His first books “songs of Jamaica” and “Constab Ballads” were published in 1912 and used the award money he received to move to the united states. He studied at the Tuskegee institute and Kansas state college for two years. He later died of a heart attack.
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The Harlem Renaissance was a cultural movement in the united states in the 1920s and 1930s. The Harlem Renaissance had common themes were slavery, black identity, the effects of institutional racism and how to convey the experience of modern black life in the urban north. It was a time for a cultural celebration. Were African Americans had endured centuries of slavery and the struggle for abolition. The great migration relocated hundreds of thousands of African Americans from the rural south to the north. It began when disenfranchisement and Jim crow laws led many African Americans to hope for a new life up north. The northern economy had numerous jobs, and factory owners looked near and far for sources of cheap labor, but northerners did not welcome African Americans with open