A Fierce Hatred of Injustice: Claude McKay's Jamaican Poetry of Rebellion Hardcover - 2001

“Professor James engages the reader in what is a virtual rediscovery of the essential features of the great Caribbean writer, Claude McKay. The boundaries of literature and history overlap in this meticulous unfolding of the social context that shaped the world of McKay’s childhood and adolescence in Jamaica. It is a rare kind of critical investigation which will require that we all take a new look at the stature of Claude McKay.”—George Lamming

“For those of us who love Claude McKay and consider him vastly underappreciated, this book is a gift. McKay’s early life in Jamaica and the dialect poetry of that period are astutely recreated and scrutinized here by Winston James in a book of distinct importance to American, African-American, and Caribbean studies. James brings to his task not only the exacting discipline of the trained historian but also the imaginative literary flair, shrewdly controlled, that is needed to understand the subtle textures of McKay’s island origins.”—Arnold Rampersad

“Winston James convincingly uses contextual analysis of the content of Claude McKay’s two early collections of Jamaican dialect verse to locate the nascent world view which informed the poet’s later work. A Fierce Hatred of Injustice is an illuminating contribution to the growing body of scholarship on the pioneering radical Jamaican poet.”—Linton Kwesi Johnson

Winston James is Professor of History at University of California Irvine.

Claude McKay was a Jamaican-American writer and poet. He was a seminal figure in the Harlem Renaissance and author of numerous works.