Banjo: A Novel [Paperback]

Claude McKay (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: October 21, 1970

Lincoln Agrippa Daily, known on the 1920s Marseilles waterfront as “Banjo,” prowls the rough waterfront bistros with his drifter friends, drinking, looking for women, playing music, fighting, loving, and talking - about their homes in Africa, the West Indies, or the american South and about being black.

Editorial Reviews

About the Author

Claude McKay was born in Jamaica on 15th September, 1890. He began writing poetry as a schoolboy. He worked as a policeman in Spanish Town and when he was twenty-two had his first volume of poems, Songs of Jamaica (1912) published. In 1912 McKay moved to the United States where he attended Tuskegee Institute in Alabama and Kansas State University. He continued to write poetry and in 1918 his work was praised by both Frank Harris and Max Eastman. The following year, his poem, If We Must Die, was published in Eastman's journal, The Liberator. Frank Harris encouraged McKay to obtain writing experience in England. In 1919 McKay travelled to England where he met George Bernard Shaw who introduced him to influential left-wing figures in journalism. This included Sylvia Pankhurst, who recruited him to write for her trade union journal, Workers' Dreadnought. While in London McKay read the works of Karl Marx and becomes a committed socialist. In 1921 McKay returned to New York and became associate editor of The Liberator. Over the next year the journal published articles by McKay such as How Black Sees Green and Red and He Who Gets Slapped. He also published his best known volume of verse, Harlem Shadows (1922). In 1922 McKay went to Third International in Moscow where he represented the American Workers Party. He stayed in Europe where he wrote Trial by Lynching: Stories About Negro Life in America (1925) and Home to Harlem (1928), a novel about a disillusioned black soldier in the US Army who returns from the Western Front to live in a black ghetto. This was followed by other novels such as Banjo (1928), Gingertown (1932) and Banana Bottom (1933). McKay gradually lost faith in communism and returned to the United States in 1934. Employment was difficult to find and for a while he worked for the Federal Writers' Project. McKay's published work during this period included his autobiography, A Long Way From Home (1937) and Harlem: Negro Metropolis (1940). Unable to make a living from writing, McKay found work in a shipbuilding yard. In 1943 he suffers a stroke and the following year was baptized into the Roman Catholic faith. In 1945 his essay, On Becoming a Roman Catholic, was published. Claude McKay died in Chicago on 22nd May, 1948.

Product Details

• Paperback: 336 pages
• Publisher: Mariner Books (October 21, 1970)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0156106752
• ISBN-13: 978-0156106757
• Product Dimensions: 8 x 5.3 x 0.9 inches
• Shipping Weight: 11.2 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 3.3 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (3 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #87,630 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

14 of 14 people found the following review helpful:

1.0 out of 5 stars Distorted Version of a Brilliant Text, October 25, 2008

By 

Ernest J. Mitchell II (Cambridge, MA USA) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Banjo (Paperback)

Formed in 1992, the X Press intends "to become not only Europe's biggest, but the world's number one black book publisher." Judging by their 2000 edition of McKay's Banjo: A Story Without a Plot (1929), we will have much to fear if they succeed.

The X Press edition is rife with errors and silent emendations, beginning with omission of the book's crucial subtitle: "A Story Without a Plot." This edition also omits McKay's dedication ("For Ruthope"), along with the table of contents and the chapter titles. Worse still, the publishers frequently tamper with McKay's prose, changing punctuation, omitting clauses, and converting McKay's carefully constructed dialect passages into Standard English. Consider the book's second paragraph:

X Press: "It sure is," he noted mentally; "the most wonderful bank in the ocean I ever did see."
Original: "It sure is some moh mahvelous job," he noted mentally; "most wonderful bank in the ocean I evah did see."

X Press omits an entire phrase ("some moh mahvelous job"), blurring two separate thoughts into one and making McKay's semicolon seem ungrammatical. Banjo's vernacular "evah" becomes "ever," far from a minor point since the characters in Banjo frequently reflect on the nature of language and slang. The X Press edition does not eliminate all uses of dialect, but it does efface many. For example, there are eighteen silent emendations of dialect on page 252.

For those readers who wish to appreciate Banjo as McKay intended it, I highly recommend the Banjo (Harvest Book) Harcourt Brace edition (1957/1970), which replicates of the original Harper & Brothers 1929 edition down to the pagination. Far from being a definitive modern re-issue, the X Press edition misrepresents McKay's authorial vision, preventing readers from appreciating one of the great novels of the 20th century.

4 of 4 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars An manifesto of Black dignity, a fun book to read, May 11, 2009

By 

Tony Thomas (SUNNY ISLES BEACH, FL USA) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Banjo: A Novel (Paperback)

The years after World War One were a time for youth with adventure on their minds to follow what the war showed them and seek the world. This book brings to my mind another book of this heady time of excitement, Dos Passos great _1919_. However, this book goes far beyond the interesting and humorous adventures of its protagonists to sketch a vision of Pan African.

The characters are former sailors and dockworkers on the bum in Marseilles in the early 1920s, all Black from the United States, the West Indies, French and British Africa. Some are uneduated workers and former peasants, at least one is educated, living "the life of the people" on the beach. While careening through adventures involving very much sex, more alcohol, and encounters with whites from every level of European and American society, the book takes up the issues of race and racism, not only on the part of European and American whites, but the prejudices among and within the different Black nationalities themselves.

When the book was published young Africans, young West Indians, and Black Americans, but especially Francophone Blacks like Aime Caesaire and Leopold Senghor would would craft the Black cultural and political affirmations called Negritude, would champion this book as a call for Black unity, dignity, and for looking to the warmth, joy, and passion of the culture and people of Africa and her diaspora int he Americas.

The ordinary reader will enjoy this book because it is told with wit and grace and that it humor comes from the real world. After all, the protagonists live by their wits, not by their labor, and there are enough scraps with romance, hustlers, and the police to keep the plot moving.

I read it because its comments on culture and race are important to my own research, but once reading it, I found myself hungry for its pages every time I put it down, wanting to get through the current adventure and into the next.

2 of 23 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars tranquility, September 1, 2005

By 

Kristine V. Seymour (oklahoma) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Banjo (Paperback)

I named this tranquility because I ordered "Banjo" by McKay I got it in a few days and it was in perfect condition. Therefore I didnt have to worry a second thankyou [e-mail]