New Scholars Program: Reclaiming and Recovering Claude Mckay’s “Lost” Novel, Amiable with Big Teeth

When Amiable with Big Teeth (1941/2017), perhaps McKay’s most political novel, was found as a complete, yet unpublished typescript mixed in Samuel Roth’s papers at Columbia’s Rare Book and Manuscript Library, scholarly understanding of the Harlem or New Negro Renaissance expanded. Its recovery in 2009, nearly seven decades after it was written, posed new questions on the movement’s potential, inviting speculation as to what its impact might have been had it been published contemporaneously. Amiable reveals the struggle to develop collective identity and action among “Aframericans,” suggesting that the Renaissance was more radical than previously thought. Recovering McKay’s novel decades after he initially wrote the text in 1941 suggests that the content creation of Black scholars and artists during the New Negro Renaissance did not dwindle in the mid-1930s, but rather the support for politically charged projects produced from this era is what dissipated. I argue that Amiable was denied publication in 1941 due to its explicit exploration of leftist political ideologies and its proximity to diasporic Blackness. This paper considers what it means to recover a lost text that is being read primarily outside of its intended political moment. 

Yolanda Mackey is a PhD Candidate in the English and African American and Diaspora Studies Dual-Title Program at Pennsylvania State University. Yolanda’s project examines the radical dimensions and publishing history of texts from the Harlem Renaissance and Negritude. Her research has been supported by Penn State’s Africana Research Center, the African American Intellectual History Society, and she is the recent recipient of the Beinecke Library Research Fellowship.