Harlem Shadows

CENSUS CLAIM CORRECTED — the "UK-precedence trap" is a mis-framing. Harcourt, Brace and Company, New York, 1922 IS the true and only first edition of Harlem Shadows; no British edition of this title precedes or is contemporaneous with it, and it was McKay's first and only American poetry collection published in his lifetime. The earlier London book is a DIFFERENT TITLE, not an earlier edition of this one: Spring in New Hampshire and Other Poems (Grant Richards, London, 1920), a slim octavo of 40 pp. in fragile original tan wrappers with the original front cover label, frontispiece portrait, 31 poems, preface by I. A. Richards dated in print "September, 1920." All but five of its 31 poems were later reprinted in Harlem Shadows, which is the source of the confusion — but textual overlap is not edition precedence. Both books are collected in their own right, and Spring in New Hampshire is decidedly the scarcer. Harlem Shadows is McKay's fourth collection; his 1912 Jamaican-dialect volumes Songs of Jamaica and Constab Ballads precede everything here.