McKay Claude McKay 
Home to Harlem [EPUB ebook] 

First published in 1928 in the US, now public domain. ’Why did I want to mix myself up in a white folk’s war? It ain’t ever was any of black folks’ affair’. When Jake Brown joined the World War I effort, he was treated more like a slave than a soldier. After briefly defecting to France to escape the racial violence he was facing, Jake travelled back home to Harlem. But despite the distance he travelled, Jake cannot seem to escape the past and the explosive ways in which it can culminate in every aspect of his life. Written with brutal accuracy, Home to Harlem is the debut novel by one the first significant writers of the Harlem Renaissance. ’One of the most gifted writers of the Harlem Renaissance’–Washington Post