The novelist Home to Harlem is Claude McKay, a Jamaican-American writer and poet who was born in 1889. He is best known for his novel Home to Harlem, which was published in 1928 and was the first best-selling novel by an African-American author. The novel follows the life of Jake Brown, a young man from Jamaica who moves to Harlem in search of a better life. McKay's work was influential in the Harlem Renaissance, a period of artistic and literary production in the 1920s and 1930s.