Festus Claudius McKay was born the youngest of eleven children in Claredon Hills, Jamaica, on 15 September 1890. For the next six years, McKay lived with his parents, Thomas Francis McKay and Hannah Ann Elizabeth Edwards, who were farmers. He was then sent to live with his older brother, Uriah Theodore, a school teacher and Anglican lay preacher. Under his brother’s guidance, McKay began to read and write poetry. Walter Jekyll, an Englishman living in Jamaica (who owned an extensive library), took an interest in McKay’s poetry and later became McKay’s patron. With Jekyll’s encouragement, McKay soon published two books of dialect poetry,
Songs of Jamaica(1911) and
Constab Ballads(1912).
In 1912, McKay emigrated to the US to study agriculture, briefly at Booker T. Washington's
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Citation: Zumoff, Jacob. "Claude McKay". The Literary Encyclopedia. First published 24 September 2006; last revised 10 April 2019. [https://www.litencyc.com/php/speople.php?rec=true&UID=3053, accessed 21 November 2024.]
