Near the end of his 1933 novel “Romance in Marseille,” newly and belatedly published for the first time by Penguin Classics, the Harlem Renaissance writer Claude McKay moves toward an operatic climax by steering several characters into a bar.

While his cast is diverse — “girls and men, white and brown and black, mingled colors and odors come together” — McKay assigns them a shared pastime: “drinking, gossiping, dancing and perspiring to the sound of international jazz.” But then he predicts an imminent end to all that: “The craze of the Charleston and Black Bottom was about dead and buried.”

This whiplash trajectory — from popularity to “dead and buried” — wasn’t unusual when classical musicians of the time ventured into pop styles. While jazz-inspired music by the likes of Stravinsky and Weill has never been forgotten, the similar efforts of dozens of other composers from the same period have fallen into obscurity.