Jean Toomer (1894-1967) was an African American novelist and poet. The son of a mixed-race freedman born into slavery who later joined ranks with the mulatto elite in Washington DC, Toomer's lighter skin and upbringing in all-white schools and neighbourhoods caused him to not to identify as black or white but rather an American who represented a new mixed race. Despite his refusal to be bound or classified by race, Toomer is considered one of the most important African American writers to come from the Harlem Renaissance.

“[Toomer] is American literature’s greatest, most enduring enigma. . . . But here, in this lush, bleak book, in his evocation of the world as it is instead of how it ought to be, something hardier, more useful is conveyed — of the possibilities for epiphany, the reliable consolations of love and revenge. And in his style — this pastiche of poem, autobiography and fable — there is an integration of the self that the life never afforded.”—Parul Sehgal, The New York Times“Over the past 95 years this Harlem Renaissance ‘experiment’ — a mosaic of poems, vignettes and short stories, many of these last being shocking studies of loneliness and the longing for love — has risen from relative obscurity to become what it always was, a groundbreaking work of 20th-century American literature.”—Michael Dirda, The Washington Post