Claude McKay in Marseille, Bouches-du-Rhône (13)

This plaque, dedicated to one of the leading lights of the Harlem Renaissance, writer Claude McKay (1889–1948), was only unveiled in Vieux Port in June 2015. McKay spent several months in the late twenties in the poor (and now non-existent) area La Fosse, where he wrote the novel Banjo: A Story without a Plot (1929), which is set in low-life Marseille. The eponymous main character is an occasional dock worker and lives among immigrants and drifters of many nationalities, prostitutes, pimps and the like.