The document published here for the first time, “Group Life and Literature,” is an unfinished late essay by Claude McKay, the vagabond poet and enfant terrible of the Harlem Renaissance. 1 Although no date is given on the typescript or on the folder in which it resides at Yale University’s Beinecke Library, in the James Weldon Johnson Memorial Collection, it was probably written in 1938 or 1939. The reference to Richard Wright’s Uncle Tom’s Children , which was published in 1938, as a “recent startling phenomenon,” added by hand on the typescript, means that at least this annotation could not have been made earlier. Despite being professional rivals at the time, notably in their conflicting relations to the Communist Party, McKay and Wright were then both part of the Federal Writers’ Project and worked together in the FWP’s New York City offices (see Cooper 362). As a New Deal program launched by the Works Progress Administration (WPA) agency, the FWP ran from 1936 to 1940 and provided life-sustaining employment to thousands of established and emerging US writers during the latter half of the Great Depression, including, among many others, Zora Neale Hurston, Arna Bontemps, Richard Durham, Robert Hayden, Margaret Walker, Dorothy West, and a young Ralph Ellison (who also worked at the New York branch).
Claude Mckay (Thu,) studied this question.