New York Times Reads Claude McKay’s Romance in Marseille

Talya Zax underscores the significance of Claude McKay's Romance in Marseille, which is finally being published after waiting some 87 years. In the pages of the New York Times, Zax ties McKay's book to the Harlem Renaissance while detailing the ways it adds something new to our understanding of the literary movement. "The book’s themes — queerness, the legacy of slavery, postcolonial African identity — are among those at the forefront of literature today," writes Zax. "But McKay lived from 1889 to 1948, and was a central figure of the Harlem Renaissance." More: 

Now, a century after that movement began, “Romance in Marseille” will finally be published for the first time on Feb. 11. Its debut coincides with recent shifts in thinking about the Renaissance, which is increasingly seen as grappling not only with race but with class, gender, sexuality and nationality.

“Romance in Marseille,” published by Penguin Classics and edited by Gary Edward Holcomb and William J. Maxwell, is the second of McKay’s posthumous novels to appear in recent years, after the 2017 publication of “Amiable With Big Teeth.” McKay began writing “Romance in Marseille” in 1929 and put it aside in 1933. It was a practical decision; McKay earned his living from writing, and his editor, Eugene Saxton, who had previously challenged sexually transgressive passages in his books, believed that “Romance in Marseille” was too shocking to sell.

“He’s writing about the underclass,” said Diana Lachatanere, who oversees McKay’s literary estate through the Faith Childs Literary Agency. That subject placed McKay in conflict with gatekeepers of literary Harlem, and specifically W.E.B. Du Bois. It’s no surprise that “Romance in Marseille,” perhaps McKay’s most complicated examination of marginalized economic and social classes, couldn’t find a publisher during his lifetime. (“Who’s running publishing houses?” Lachatanere asked. “Very staid middle-class people.”) While the novel is in some ways dated, it still, today, feels radical.

Read on at the New York Times.