Claude McKay's long odyssey from Jamaica to Harlem, Europe, North Africa, Russia, and back to America is chronicled in this autobiography of the most militant of the writers to emerge from the New Negro movement following World War I. Whether in the intellectual circles of Harlem and Greenwich Village, the docks of Marseilles, or the inner circles of post-Revolutionary Russia, McKay's contact with such figures as Frank Harris, Max Eastman, George Bernard Shaw, W.E.B. Du Bois, James Weldon Johnson, Charles Chaplin, H.G. Wells, Sinclair Lewis, Trotsky, and Radek all served to advance those views which would be so widely accepted in the 1960s--Black Pride, self-determination, and the necessity for Black culture to define itself.