Claude McKay was born in the Jamaica, West Indies in 1890.  The youngest of eleven  children.  A member of the Island's land-owning aristocracy. At the tender age of  ten he wrote a rhymed  acrostic for his elementary school.  At seventeen he met a  white mentor  named Walter Jekyll  who introduced him to the classical literature of  Browning, Baudelaire, Carpenter, and Oscar Wilde.  Jekyll also encouraged  McKay  to write two volumes of dialect poetry, "Songs of Jamaica" and "Constab Ballads."   
In 1912  Claude  came to America.  His first two years were rough. He worked as a restaurant manager, a porter, a fireman, a dining car waiter and a bar-boy. He  also encountered the type of racism the was peculiar to America. After his ephemeral career as a Jack-Of-All-Trades he came to Harlem.  In Harlem he landed a job as an editor for a  liberal white magazine called "The Liberator."  While at "The Liberator"  he wrote poetry that was  militant and revolutionary, such as the classic "If We Must Die". Shortly after leaving the magazine in 1922 he published his first American book, "Harlem Shadows" - a collection of seventy poems - the book was  considered the forerunner to the literature of  The Harlem Renaissance.
Unfortunately , Claude was shunned by the  black intelligentsia of the Renaissance . They labeled him as a dangerously radical socialist.  At the same time Claude distanced himself from African Americans because he thought himself an alien to their culture. Ironically the literature of  McKay revealed the common experience he shared with African Americans.
In 1922 Claude left the U.S. to travel abroad.  He stayed away for twelve  years.  While he was overseas he lived in Russia, Berlin, Paris, Marseilles, Tangiers, and Cap d Antibes. Also, while he lived in Europe he wrote a novel called "Home In Harlem."  The book was published in New York in 1928 and deemed one of the best black novels published during The Harlem Renaissance.
In 1948 Claude McKay died of congestive heart failure at the age of fifty seven.
Some have said that his militant poetry was the force and the foundation for the "Black Power" ideology of the 1960s.