A Jean Toomer Reader

A useful addition to African-American literary scholarship....Properly emphasizes what Toomer critics have identified as the major themes of his life and work.

• I. Cane 1: Pre-Cane Letter to Waldo Frank, John McClure, Frank, The Liberator, Lola Ridge, Sherwood Anderson 2: Cane Letter to Gorham Munson, Kenneth Macgowan, Frank 3: Post-Cane Letter to Frank, Horace Liveright II. The Mystical Experience The Experience III. The Negro, the Blue Man, and the New Race Introduction: Prejudice; Germ Carriers; The Fable of a Creature 2: The Negro Negro Psychology in The Emperor Jones Letter to Sherwood Anderson The Negro Emergent 3: The Blue Man Letter to Horace Liveright, Waldo Frank Not Typically American Fighting the Vice 4: The New Race A New Race in America Letter to James Weldon Johnson The Americans Oppose the Force, Not the Man Mankind Means Brotherhood IV. Caught in the Machine To Dyke Selling F. Scott Fitzgerald: A Comment on the Vegetable by Drackman The Scottsboro Boys American Letter To Sleep Love on a Train Man's Home Companion Lump The Spoken Word Winter Road George Washington Atomic Energy V. A Children's Story Monrovia VI. The Land 1 Introduction: Highways Should Be Rightways It Used to Be Why These? The Extremes Are Great 2: The Northeast New York The Brilliant Brotherhood: New York City during the Mystical Experience of 1926 Doylestown The Presence of a Field 3: The South Night 4: Chicago 5: New Mexico To the Land of the People Rainbow The Dust of Abiquiu Taos Night New Mexico after India Part of the Universe Santa Fe Sequence 6: California Caromb America's Proposed Riveria: A Chicagoan's Impressions of Los Angeles VII. Epilogue Music A Double Portrait To Georgia O'Keeffe and Alfred Stieglitz Tired, I have come to the door Bibliography