Cane
21,000+ Reviews
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Description
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.
Product Details
Price
$15.95
$14.83
Publisher
Liveright Publishing Corporation
Publish Date
June 13, 2011
Pages
256
Dimensions
5.5 X 8.2 X 0.7 inches | 0.45 pounds
Language
English
Type
Paperback
EAN/UPC
9780871402103
BISAC Categories:
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About the Author
Jean Toomer (1894-1967) was born in Washington, D.C., the son of educated blacks of Creole stock. Literature was his first love and he regularly contributed avant garde poetry and short stories to such magazines as Dial, Broom, Secession, Double Dealer, and Little Review. After a literary apprenticeship in New York, Toomer taught school in rural Georgia. His experiences there led to the writing of Cane.
Rudolph P. Byrd (Ph.D. Yale University) is the Goodrich C. White Professor of American Studies in the Graduate Institute of the Liberal Arts and the Department of African American Studies and the founding director of the James Weldon Johnson Institute for Advanced Interdisciplinary Studies at Emory University. He is the author and editor of ten books, including Jean Toomer's Years with Gurdjieff; Essentials by Jean Toomer with Charles Johnson; Charles Johnson's Novels: Writing the American Palimpsest; The Essential Writings of James Weldon Johnson; and with Alice Walker The World Has Changed: Conversations with Alice Walker. Among Professor Byrd's awards and fellowships are an Andrew W. Mellon Fellowship at Harvard University; Visiting Scholar at the Bellagio Study and Conference Center; and the Thomas Jefferson Award from Emory University. He is a founding officer of the Alice Walker Literary Society.
Henry Louis Gates, Jr., is the W.E.B. Du Bois Professor of the Humanities, chair of the Department of Afro-American Studies, and director of the W.E.B. Du Bois Institute for Afro-American research at Harvard University. Among his many books are Colored People: A Memoir and Wonders of the African World. He won an American Book Award in 1989 for The Signifying Monkey.
Reviews
By far the most impressive product of the Negro Renaissance, Cane ranks with Richard Wright's Native Son and Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man as a measure of the Negro novelist's highest achievement. Jean Toomer belongs to that first rank of writers who use words almost as a plastic medium, shaping new meanings from an original and highly personal style. --Robert A. Bone, The Negro Novel in America (1965)"
