Jean Toomer – författare

Jean Toomer's Cane is one of the most significant works to come out of the Harlem Renaissance and is considered to be a masterpiece in American modernist literature due to its distinct structure and style. First published in 1923 and told through a series of vignettes, Cane uses poetry, prose and play-like dialogue to create a window into the varied lives of African Americans living in the rural South and urban North during a time when Jim Crow laws pervaded and racism reigned.

Includes correspondence, poetry, short fiction, and essays.

Jean Toomer (1894–1967) was a modernist writer, a member of the Harlem Renaissance, and briefly part of the literary and artistic community that grew up around Mabel Dodge Luhan in Taos, New Mexico. This book, a critical edition of a previously unpublished 1935 manuscript, makes A Drama of the Southwest available to readers for the first time. The play provides a vivid glimpse into the social world of the artists who mined Taos for creative and spiritual renewal in the early twentieth century, and editor Dekker provides cultural and literary historical context, arguing for Toomer’s continuing creative power and significance at a time in his career that has been largely overlooked by critics.

First published in 1923, Jean Toomer’s Cane is an innovative literary work—part drama, part poetry, part fiction—powerfully evoking black life in the South. Rich in imagery, Toomer’s impressionistic, sometimes surrealistic sketches of Southern rural and urban life are permeated by visions of smoke, sugarcane, dusk, and fire; the northern world is pictured as a harsher reality of asphalt streets. This iconic work of American literature is published with a new afterword by Rudolph Byrd of Emory University and Henry Louis Gates Jr. of Harvard University, who provide groundbreaking biographical information on Toomer, place his writing within the context of American modernism and the Harlem Renaissance, and examine his shifting claims about his own race and his pioneering critique of race as a scientific or biological concept.

This Norton Critical Edition includes:The text of Toomer’s genre-bending masterpiece as edited by Darwin T. Turner for the First Norton Critical Edition (1988).A revised and expanded introduction, featuring new archival discoveries, and annotations by Henry Louis Gates, Jr., and Jesse McCarthy.Thirteen illustrations related to Toomer’s life, which are new to the Third Edition, and the map of Sparta, Georgia, that accompanies the text.Thirty-five background selections that feature additional writings by Toomer and extensive excerpts from his personal correspondence.Twenty-five critical responses—nine of which are new to the Third Edition—from contemporary and modern critics examining important themes in the work. A chronology of Toomer’s life and a selected bibliography.