 Recorded Books and RB Digital Present Romance in Marseille by Claude McKay Edited and with an introduction by Gary Edward Holcomb and William J. Maxwell Narrated by Dionne Graham Claude McKay, 1889-1948, born Festus Claudius McKay, is widely regarded as one of the most important literary and political writers of the interwar period and the Harlem Renaissance. Born in Jamaica, he moved to the United States in 1912 to study at the Tuskegee Institute. In 1928, he published his most famous novel, Home to Harlem, which won a Harman Foundation Award for Literature. He also published two other novels, Banjo and Banana Bottom, as well as a collection of short stories, Ginger Town, two autobiographical books, A Long Way from Home and My Green Hills of Jamaica, and a work of non-fiction, Harlem, Negro Metropolis. His complete poems were published posthumously, and in 1977 he was named the National Poet of Jamaica. Introduction Visiting Barcelona in September 1929, Claude McKay, 1889-1948, one of the earliest stars of the Harlem Renaissance, set to work on a novel he then called The Jungle and the Bottoms. Seven years earlier, during the honest marvellous he shared with Ulysses, The Wasteland, and Jacob's Room, the Jamaican-born, hard-traveling McKay had published The Harlem Movement's first substantial book of poetry, Harlem Shadows, 1922, in New York. Six years after that, his first novel, Home to Harlem, 1928, had enjoyed multiple printings as the Harlem Renaissance's first certified American bestseller. Launching The Jungle and the Bottoms in Spain in the autumn of the stock market crash, however, an author recognized for originality, planned to rework already covered material. As McKay initially sketched it, his new book would recycle both the Marseille Dockside setting and the loose, picker-esque storytelling of his second novel, Banjo, A Story Without a Plot, 1929. A rambling tale of black life led as a dream of vagabondage. Yet, within months, he was rethinking The Jungle and the Bottoms wholesale, aiming to break with Banjo by drafting an uncluttered, linear plot, combining his rowdy troop of sailors, dock workers, and fee de joie, collectively straight and queer, disabled and able-bodied, African, European, Caribbean, and American. In the summer of 1930, following transatlantic debates with his New York publisher and Paris literary agent over the merits of the novel, McKay lost his enthusiasm for this story with a plot and set the manuscript aside. Hoping he could salvage the work, he took it up again in 1932, the interracial history and fluid sexual landscape of his new home of Morocco, spurring a return to the raw miscellany of his jungle. Adding scores of pages in an operatically violent ending, McKay restyled the novel as Savage Loving, a title calculated to attract the carnal imagination and the sales figures he had not earned since home to Harlem. But a now ill and impoverished author again faced editorial obstacles, not to mention harassment from British consular agents and French colonial administrators suspicious of his doings around Tangier's international zone. By the time he abandoned the project for good in the Great Depression depths of 1933, he had given the completed novel its least sensational and most place bound name, Romance and Marseille. In another break from Banjo, McKay finally preferred the de-anglicized French spelling of the city without a final S, fulfilling his self-description as a cosmopolitan, bad nationalist. Whatever the politics of its orthography, what you hold in your hands or read on your screen or are listening to is the first version of Romance and Marseille published in any form, anywhere. After nearly 90 years in waiting, this descendant of the jungle in the bottoms and Savage Loving has escaped its tangled transnational composition history to make its public debut. McKay's legacy will never look the same and neither will the Harlem Renaissance, black Atlantic modernism, Caribbean post-colonialism, 20th century LGBTQ writing, the lost generation, and the radical novel between the world wars. Above all, perhaps our understanding of the literature of disability will need to account for a strange and absorbing new view of colonial racism and the heritage of European slavery.