Jake Brown, a World War I army deserter, is one of the protagonists of Claude McKay's novel Home to Harlem. When he leaves London and returns to New York, Jake gets entangled in the seedy side of Harlem life prostitutes, clubs, and gambling halls. He reunites briefly with a former war buddy, Zeddy Plummer, and later befriends a Haitian immigrant named Ray while they are both working on a train.
The novel explores the plight of young Black men in the early twentieth century in America, and was both applauded and criticized for its sensual, brutal honesty of its portrayal of urban life.
About Claude McKay
Claude McKay (born September 15, 1889, Nairne Castle, Jamaica, British West Indies—died May 22, 1948, Chicago, Illinois, U.S.) was a Jamaican-born American poet and novelist who was one of the leading voices of the Harlem Renaissance. His book Home to Harlem (1928) was the most popular novel written by a Black American author to that time. Before moving to the United States in 1912, he wrote two volumes of Jamaican dialect verse, Songs of Jamaica and Constab Ballads (1912).
