New Novel of Harlem Renaissance Is Found

“The irrefutable archival evidence we have is when Eastman directly quotes from the novel,” Mr. Cloutier said. “McKay sent him pages, all from the summer of 1941 and a bit later.” (They also found letters referring to a contract between McKay and E. P. Dutton to write the novel.)

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Robert Caplin for The New York Times

The manuscript of the novel by McKay that was found.

The authentication of the novel is “scholarly gold,” said William J. Maxwell, the editor of “Complete Poems: Claude McKay.” Its mocking portraits of Communists show McKay’s decisive break with Communism and his effort to turn his political evolution into art, said Mr. Maxwell, a professor of English and African-American Studies at Washington University in St. Louis.

Moreover, while the flowering of arts known as the Harlem Renaissance obsessively documented black life in the 1920s, he said, far less is known about the period of the 1930s, focused on in “Amiable.”

Many scholars believe that the Harlem Renaissance’s creative energy had pretty much run out by the late 1930s. But Mr. Edwards said he believed that “Amiable” would eventually be recognized “as the key political novel of the black intellectual life in New York in the late 1930s.”

McKay represents the Communists as amiable with big teeth, he said, but they end up being a “wolf in sheep’s clothing.”

“I cannot think of another novel that gives us such a rich and multilayered portrayal of black life,” Mr. Edwards continued. “There are scenes with artists in salons, in nightclubs, in queer nightclubs. It has almost a documentary aspect.”

Despite his moment in the spotlight, Mr. Cloutier is still in the middle of his dissertation, which he expects to complete in 2013 or 2014. Its title? “Archival Vagabonds: 20th Century American Fiction and the Archives in Novelistic Practice.” And the McKay manuscript remains where Mr. Cloutier found it, now archived in Box 29, Folders 7 and 8, of the Samuel Roth papers.