A signed first edition of Claude McKay’s non-fiction book, “Harlem: Negro Metropolis,” will be on display and available for purchase at this year’s New York International Antiquarian Book Fair.
The fair, which takes place from April 3 through 6 at Manhattan’s Park Avenue Armory, will be a rare opportunity for Antiquarian Book Fair attendees to touch and peruse a book that once passed through the hands of two famous Harlem Renaissance writers: the book was a gift from McKay, the renowned Jamaican-born poet, to the African American novelist and folklorist Zora Neale Hurston.
“To Zora Neale Hurston,” McKay inscribed in ink on the book’s inside flap: “rare explorer, exponent and creator of the life of our folk. – From her admired Claude McKay / January 1941.”
The book is being offered for sale for $175,000 by Burnside Rare Books, a Portland, Oregon-based bookstore. “It’s a pretty dazzling association copy between two luminaries of the Harlem Renaissance,” said Rachel Phillips, a co-owner at Burnside. “It basically passed from the hands of one to the other and was notably owned by Ms. Zora Neale Hurston herself. It’s such an incredible piece of American literary history.”
Burnside Rare Books purchased “Harlem: Negro Metropolis” from someone who inherited it from an aunt. When the aunt passed away nearly 12 years ago, the book was willed to them. Anyone attending the book fair can see and look through the book, Phillips said. “The fair is like a museum, but you can buy the books. The book will be behind a glass case but you can ask for someone to bring it out to show it to you, people can handle books at these fairs.”
A critical eye on Harlem
“If you’re interested in mid-century Black writing –– and journalism, especially –– this is his only book of journalism,” Dr. Gary Holcomb of Ohio University explained to the AmNews. “I would also say that it shows an arc in his intellectual political life.”
Holcomb is a co-editor, along with James Madison University Professor Brooks E. Hefner, of the upcoming book “Claude McKay: Letters in Exile” (Yale University Press, 2025). He said that “Harlem: Negro Metropolis” shows McKay’s state of mind as he began turning away from predominantly white-led, leftist organizations. Just as Richard Wright, the author of “Native Son,” and other Black intellectuals had become disillusioned with the direction of the Communist Party U.S.A., McKay too began to doubt that the Party was acting in the best interests of Black people.
“He was critical of the Communist Party’s agenda, which put class at the top of political revolutionary objectives, and racism and imperialism were to be dealt with through class revolution,” said Holcomb. “A lot of Black intellectuals didn’t think this was a viable revolutionary thesis. He was eager to show that Black people were able to pilot their own economic and political future without what he regarded as intrusive, organized, leftist ideology.”
McKay’s book casts a critical eye on Harlem and some of its most prominent figures of the time like the spiritual leader Father Divine, the United Negro Improvement Association’s Marcus Garvey, and the strident religious and labor leader Sufi Abdul Hamid. McKay suggested that these leaders and local Black businesses could organize Harlem and help fortify it. “There is a constant struggle of economic, social and political forces in Harlem, and this struggle symbolizes the aspiration of Negroes everywhere,” a Nov. 9, 1940, Amsterdam News review of the book declared. “The author depicts the turmoil and search of his group for a way out of the chaos and impasse in which it finds itself with unusual vividness. The lack of ‘community commerce,’ he tells us, is largely responsible for Harlem’s critical economic plight… ‘This feature, more than anything, strikes the eye and invites sarcastic or cynical comment from every intelligent visitor. There is no other American community in which the huge bulk of local business from the smallest to the largest, is operated by outsiders.’”
Jean-Christophe Cloutier, co-editor of the recently published, scholarly edition of Claude McKay’s “Amiable with Big Teeth: A Novel of the Love Affair Between the Communists and the Poor Black Sheep of Harlem” (Penguin Classics, 2017) calls “Harlem: Negro Metropolis” an amazing book of research and fact-finding. McKay began formulating it while he was employed by the New York branch of the Federal Writers Project between 1936 and 1939, this was when he had time to research and write about life in Harlem. This book is the culmination of those years of research; it inspired his “Amiable with Big Teeth” novel.
“There are chapters on the numbers game in Harlem and on very important figures like Father Divine, who claimed to be God,” Cloutier said. “But he’s also kind of exposing some of these figures that he considers to be not necessarily beneficial for the Black community. He also put a spotlight on figures and people that he admires, and thinks are more positive leaders like Sufi Hamid, who was a labor organizer. There’s also a beautiful chapter on Casper Holstein, who was a former number’s game boss in Harlem who had kind of turned into a philanthropist and was now trying to use his accumulated wealth –– from an illegal business –– but now trying to give back and even inventing fellowships for local artists at the time.”
Soul of Harlem
Cloutier suggests that the dedication of the Burnside Rare Books copy of the book to Zora Neale Hurston was because of her favorable review of McKay’s work in Common Ground magazine. The book had been applauded by Hurston and a few other artists, intellectuals, and prominent businesspeople but it was more generally ignored and did not sell well. This pushed McKay’s publisher, E. P. Dutton, to be much less interested in the “Amiable with Big Teeth” novel.
Cloutier revealed that “Amiable with Big Teeth” was originally supposed to be entitled “God’s Black Sheep.” The fictional novel borrowed a lot of its ideas from “Harlem: Negro Metropolis,” he explained. Sufi Abdul Hamid is a character in the novel and although the real-life, Caribbean-born Casper Holstein is not characterized, McKay created a similar former-numbers-runner-turned-philanthropist named Pablo Peixota from Honduras for the book.
McKay also dramatized the Black empowerment issues of “Harlem: Negro Metropolis” in “Amiable with Big Teeth,” Cloutier said. “With the cause for Ethiopia [which was fighting an invasion from Italy], is the Black community going to follow a Comintern-run organization, or are they going to follow an all-Black, Aid-to-Ethiopia organization? It’s kind of like the soul of Harlem rests in the bounds of who they will choose, you know, a Black self-reliance or a white-controlled group.”
Hurston’s copy of McKay’s book at the Antiquarian Book Fair brings with it echoes of early 20th-century Harlem. Even the book’s dedication appears to share a wink between the two authors, as Cloutier points out: “Did you notice that in the dedication McKay wrote ‘From her admired Claude McKay’? I love that; it’s hilarious. That’s like a joke between the two of them. They’re both towering now, especially in retrospect, they’re towering figures of what we call the Harlem Renaissance, which was the New Negro Movement, and both actually kept publishing in the 1930s, even though a lot of people think that the Renaissance kind of just ends with the Depression in 1929. But Langston Hughes, Hurston, McKay, they all continued publishing.”