*Banjo*, a novel by the Jamaican-American writer Claude McKay (1890–1948), is one of the works that helped launch the Harlem Renaissance. McKay’s protagonist—a musician named Lincoln Agrippa Daily, known as Banjo—wanders through Marseille in the company of pimps, the destitute, and Black expatriates seeking pleasure and adventure. The novel teems with memorable, multinational characters—types the author encountered during his travels around the world. The book is at once a passionate manifesto and a condemnation of racial prejudice, yet also a vivid, lively depiction of the lives of colorful Marseille drifters who find themselves in comical situations.