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Claude McKay’s Home to Harlem, the second offering in the Library of America’s two-volume collection of nine Harlem Renaissance novels, is an outstanding, refreshing, exhilarating, musical work full of sweet longing and suspense, an artful record of the timeless love affair between pain and laughter in which each, mutually and gratefully dependent on the other, flowers and bleeds. The source of pain: American history, ignorance, hatred, prejudice. The source of laughter: the indomitable human spirit dressed up for the dance in society’s latest colorful, stylish rags. McKay’s dialogue and dialect is an art in itself; his narration is superb. Reading, I felt like a glad fool with a knife in my back, kept alive by love.

October 25, 2020

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I just read your letter —
then looked inside
the envelope one last time.

Songs and Letters, April 11, 2008

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