- Paperback: 336 pages
- Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt (Jan 12 2001)
- Language: English
- ISBN-10: 0156106752
- ISBN-13: 978-0156106757
- Product Dimensions: 20.3 x 13.5 x 2.3 cm
- Shipping Weight: 318 g
- Amazon Bestsellers Rank: #741,798 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
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Product Details |
Product Description
Product Description
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.
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.
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Most Helpful Customer Reviews on Amazon.com (beta)
Amazon.com:
3.2 out of 5 stars (4 customer reviews)
16 of 16 people found the following review helpful
1.0 out of 5 stars
Distorted Version of a Brilliant Text, Oct 25 2008
By Ernest J. Mitchell II - Published on Amazon.com
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 - Published on Amazon.com
Amazon Verified Purchase(What's this?)
This review is from: Banjo: A Story without a Plot (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.
3.0 out of 5 stars
A Story Without a Plot... how fitting..., Feb 9 2012
By Sarah - Published on Amazon.com
This review is from: Banjo: A Story without a Plot (Paperback)
I'm sorry to say this was a very hard read for me. I know the subtitle says "A Story Without a Plot", but I didn't think this was really going to be like that.The setting is very nice. It's a late Twenties Marseilles, were a varied humanity gathers in the zone of the port to make a living. The life of these people is vividly depicted, the way they work, the way they live, the way they sometimes just about survives. The bistros and the bordellos are the main places where the story unfolds, full of people, music, different scents. You can really see and feel these places.
But as much as the crowd has a soul (in a way), the main characters in the story don't. Banjo and Ray aside, they all looked the same to me. They didn't have a purpose, they just seem to roam about, from a bistro to the next, leading quite an aimless life. I always hoped something would happen soon, but it never. And without the drive of a plot, I just read along with my waning interest.
It ended up being quite boring for me, just because nothing relevant ever happened. A shame, really.
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