Claude McKay (1890–1948), who also wrote under the pseudonym Eli Edwards, was born in Jamaica, in the West Indies, to poor farm workers. He was educated by his brother and by an Englishman who was a specialist in Jamaican folklore. His first two collections of poems, written in native dialect, were published in England in 1912. These collections earned him prize money that helped him to emigrate to the United States that year. He studied at Booker T. Washington's Tuskegee Institute and at Kansas State College. After moving to Harlem in 1914, he worked at odd jobs, and pursued his writing.

McKay was a prominent figure in the Harlem Renaissance who was radicalized by the racial prejudice he witnessed and experienced. He left America to live in Europe but returned after the publication of his award-winning novel Home to Harlem (1928), one of the first bestsellers by an African-American writer. By the 1940s, he had repudiated his earlier radicalism and become a naturalized citizen. McKay's "If We Must Die," written as a response to the Harlem race riots of 1919, is considered a major impetus behind the Civil Rights movement that began after World War II and the poem was entered into the United States Congressional Record.

In 1942, McKay joined the Catholic Church and for the last five years of his life lived in Chicago doing research for the National Catholic Youth Organization. His works include Songs of Jamaica (poetry, 1912), Harlem Shadows (poetry, 1922), Banjo (1929), Banana Bottom (1933), Gingertown (short stories, 1932), A Long Way from Home (autobiography, 1937), and Harlem: Negro Metropolis (sociological study, 1940).