Cane (novel)

Last updated
Cane
Canejeantoomer.jpg
First edition
(Publ. Boni and Liveright)
Author Jean Toomer
LanguageEnglish
Publisher Boni and Liveright
Publication date
1923;101 years ago (1923)
Publication placeUnited States
Media typePrint
Pages239 p.
ISBN 9780871405357
OCLC 168697

Cane is a 1923 novel by noted Harlem Renaissance author Jean Toomer. The novel is structured as a series of vignettes revolving around the origins and experiences of African Americans in the United States. The vignettes alternate in structure between narrative prose, poetry, and play-like passages of dialogue. As a result, the novel has been classified as a composite novel or as a short story cycle. Though some characters and situations recur in different vignettes, the vignettes are mostly freestanding, tied to the other vignettes thematically and contextually more than through specific plot details.

Contents

The novel's ambitious and unconventional structure, along with its lasting impact on subsequent generations of writers, has contributed to the recognition of Cane as an important part of modernism. [1] Some of the vignettes from the novel have been extracted and included in literary collections, while the poetic passage "Harvest Song" has been featured in multiple Norton poetry anthologies. The poem begins with the evocative line: "I am a reaper whose muscles set at sundown." [2]

Writing Cane

Jean Toomer began writing sketches that would become the first section of Cane in November 1921 on a train from Georgia to Washington D.C. [3] By Christmas of 1921, the first draft of those sketches and the short story "Kabnis" were complete. Waldo Frank, Toomer's close friend, suggested that Toomer combine the sketches into a book. In order to form a book-length manuscript, Toomer added sketches relating to the black urban experience. When Toomer completed the book, he wrote: "My words had become a book…I had actually finished something." [4]

However, before the book was published, Toomer's initial euphoria began to fade. He wrote, "The book is done but when I look for the beauty I thought I'd caught, they thin out and elude me." [5] He thought that the Georgia sketches lacked complexity and said they were "too damn simple for me." [6] In a letter to Sherwood Anderson, Toomer wrote that the story-teller style of "Fern" "had too much waste and made too many appeals to the reader." [7]

In August 1923, Toomer received a letter from Horace Liveright asking for revisions to the bibliographic statement Toomer had submitted for promotions of the book. Liveright requested that Toomer mention his "colored blood," because that was the "real human interest value" of his story. [8] Toomer had a history of complex beliefs about his own racial identity, and in the spring of 1923 he had written to the Associated Negro Press saying he would be pleased to write for the group's black readership on events that concerned them. [3] However, when Toomer read Liveright's letter he was outraged. He responded that his "racial composition" was of no concern to anyone except himself, and asserted that he was not a "Negro" and would not "feature" himself as such. Toomer was even willing to cancel the publication of the book. [9]

Drawing of Jean Toomer by Winold Reiss (c. 1925). Housed at the National Portrait Gallery. Public domain. Jean Toomer Drawing (c. 1925, Reiss).jpg
Drawing of Jean Toomer by Winold Reiss (c. 1925). Housed at the National Portrait Gallery. Public domain.

Structure

Toomer spent a great deal of time working on the structure of Cane. He said that the design was a circle. Aesthetically, Cane builds from simple to complex forms; regionally, it moves from the South to the North and then back to the South; and spiritually, it begins with "Bona and Paul," grows through the Georgia narratives, and ends in "Harvest Song." [5] The first section focuses on southern folk culture; the second section focuses on urban life in Washington D.C. and Chicago; and the third section is about the racial conflicts experienced by a black Northerner living in the South.

In his autobiography, Toomer wrote: "I realized with deep regret, that the spirituals, meeting ridicule, would be certain to die out. With Negroes also the trend was towards the small town and then towards the city—and industry and commerce and machines. The folk-spirit was walking in to die on the modern desert. That spirit was so beautiful. Its death was so tragic. Just this seemed to sum life for me. And this was the feeling I put into Cane. Cane was a swan-song. It was a song of an end." [10]

Contents

Preamble

First section:

Second section:

Third section:

Critical reception

Cane was largely ignored during the Harlem Renaissance by the average white and African American reader. Langston Hughes addressed this in his essay "The Negro Artist and the Racial Mountain" by saying, "'O, be respectable, write about nice people, show how good we are,' say the Negroes. 'Be stereotyped, don't go too far, don't shatter our illusions about you, don't amuse us too seriously. We will pay you,' say the whites. Both would have told Jean Toomer not to write Cane. The colored people did not praise it. Although the critics gave it good reviews, the public remained indifferent. Yet (excepting the works of Du Bois) Cane contains the finest prose written by a Negro in America. And like the singing of Robeson it is truly racial." [11] Hughes suggests that Cane failed to be popular among the masses because it did not reinforce white views of African Americans. It did not fit the model of the "Old Negro" and did not depict the lifestyle of African Americans living in Harlem that whites wanted to see.

Cane was not widely read when it was published but was generally praised by both black and white critics. Montgomery Gregory, an African American, wrote in his 1923 review: "America has waited for its own counterpart of Maran—for that native son who would avoid the pitfalls of propaganda and moralizing on the one hand and the snares of a false and hollow race pride on the other hand. One whose soul mirrored the soul of his people, yet whose vision was universal. Jean Toomer…is the answer to this call." [12] Gregory criticized Toomer for his labored and puzzling style and for Toomer's overuse of the folk. Gregory believed that Toomer was biased towards folk culture and resented city life.

W. E. B. Du Bois reviewed Cane in 1924, saying: "Toomer does not impress me as one who knows his Georgia but he does know human beings." [12] Du Bois goes on to say that Toomer does not depict an exact likeness of humans but rather depicts them like an Impressionist painter. Du Bois also wrote that Toomer's writing is deliberately puzzling—"I cannot, for the life of me, for instance, see why Toomer could not have made the tragedy of Carma something that I could understand instead of vaguely guess at." [13] [14]

In his 1939 review "The New Negro", Sanders Redding wrote: "Cane was experimental, a potpourri of poetry and prose, in which the latter element is significant because of the influence it had on the course of Negro fiction." [12]

White critics who reviewed Cane in 1923 were mostly positive about the novel, praising its new portrayal of African Americans. John Armstrong wrote: "It can perhaps be safely said that the Southern negro, at least, has found an authentic lyric voice in Jean Toomer…there is nothing of the theatrical coon-strutting high-brown, none of the conventional dice-throwing, chicken-stealing nigger of musical comedy and burlesque in the pages of Cane." [12] He goes on to say, "the Negro has been libeled rather than depicted accurately in American fiction" [15] because fiction typically portrays African Americans as stereotypes. Cane gave white readers a chance to see a human portrayal of blacks—"[blacks] were seldom ever presented to white eyes with any other sort of intelligence than that displayed by an idiot child with epilepsy."

Robert Littell wrote in his 1923 review that "Cane does not remotely resemble any of the familiar, superficial views of the South on which we have been brought up. On the contrary, Mr. Toomer's view is unfamiliar and bafflingly subterranean, the vision of a poet far more than the account of things seen by a novelist." [12]

Modern criticism

Alice Walker said of the book, "It has been reverberating in me to an astonishing degree. I love it passionately, could not possibly exist without it." [16]

In The Negro Novel in America, Robert A. Bone wrote: "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." [17]

Gerald Strauss points out that despite "critical uncertainty and controversy," he finds that Cane's structure is not without precedent: "it is similar to James Joyce's Dubliners (1914) and Sherwood Anderson's Winesburg, Ohio (1919), two other thematically related story collections that develop unified and coherent visions of societies. It also echoes Edgar Lee Masters's poetry collection Spoon River Anthology (1915) ... Toomer surely was familiar with the Joyce and Masters books, and he knew Anderson personally." [18]

Legacy

In 1973, Alice Walker and fellow Zora Neale Hurston scholar Charlotte D. Hunt discovered a grave they thought was Hurston's in Ft. Pierce, Florida. Walker had it marked with a gray marker stating ZORA NEALE HURSTON / A GENIUS OF THE SOUTH / NOVELIST FOLKLORIST / ANTHROPOLOGIST / 1901–1960. [19] [20] The line "a genius of the south" is from Toomer's poem "Georgia Dusk", which appears in the novel. [20] Hurston, who could be deceptive about her age, was actually born in 1891, not 1901. [21] [22]

The novel inspired the Gil Scott-Heron song "Cane", in which he sings about two main characters of the novel: Karintha and Becky. [23]

The novel inspired Marion Brown in his "Georgia" trilogy of jazz albums, especially on Geechee Recollections (1973), where he put "Karintha" to music, recited by Bill Hasson. [24] [25]

Critical studies (since 2000)

as of March 2008:

Book monographs / articles/chapters

  1. Snaith, Anna, "C. L. R. James, Claude McKay, Nella Larsen, Jean Toomer: The 'Black Atlantic' and the Modernist Novel", in Shiach, The Cambridge Companion to the Modernist Novel, Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press; 2007. pp. 206–23.
  2. Lamothe, Daphne, "Cane: Jean Toomer's Gothic Black Modernism", in Anolik and Howard, The Gothic Other: Racial and Social Constructions in the Literary Imagination. Jefferson, NC: McFarland; 2004. pp. 54–71.
  3. Petesch, Donald, "Jean Toomer's Cane", pp. 91–96, in Iftekharrudin, Boyden, Longo, and Rohrberger, Postmodern Approaches to the Short Story. Westport, CT: Praeger; 2003. xi, 156 pp. (book article)
  4. Terris, Daniel, "Waldo Frank, Jean Toomer, and the Critique of Racial Voyeurism", in Hathaway, Heather (ed.); Jarab, Josef (ed. and introd.); Melnick, Jeffrey (ed.); Race and the Modern Artist. Oxford, England: Oxford University Press; 2003. pp. 92–114.
  5. Fontenot, Chester J., Jr., "W. E. B. Du Bois's 'Of the Coming of John,' Toomer's 'Kabnis,' and the Dilemma of Self-Representation", in Hubbard, The Souls of Black Folk One Hundred Years Later. Columbia, MO: University of Missouri Press; 2003. pp. 130–60.
  6. Griffin, John Chandler, Biography of American Author Jean Toomer, 1894–1967. Lewiston, NY: The Edwin Mellen Press; 2002.
  7. Fahy, Thomas, "The Enslaving Power of Folksong in Jean Toomer's Cane", in Meyer, Literature and Music Amsterdam, Netherlands: Rodopi; 2002. pp. 47–63.
  8. Lemke, Sieglinde, "Interculturalism in Literature, the Visual and Performing Arts during the Harlem Renaissance", in Martín Flores and von Son, Double Crossings/EntreCruzamientos, Fair Haven, NJ: Nuevo Espacio; 2001. pp. 111–21.
  9. Wardi, Anissa J., "Divergent Paths to the South: Echoes of Cane in Mama Day", in Stave, Gloria Naylor: Strategy and Technique, Magic and Myth. Newark, DE; London, England: University of Delaware Press; Associated University Press; 2001. pp. 44–76.
  10. Nicholls, David G., "Jean Toomer's Cane, Modernization, and the Spectral Folk", in Scandura and Thurston, Modernism, Inc.: Body, Memory, Capital. New York, NY: New York University Press; 2001. pp. 151–70.
  11. Boelhower, William, "No Free Gifts: Toomer's 'Fern' and the Harlem Renaissance", in Fabre and Feith, Temples for Tomorrow: Looking Back at the Harlem Renaissance, Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press; 2001. pp. 193–209.
  12. Boutry, Katherine, "Black and Blue: The Female Body of Blues Writing in Jean Toomer, Toni Morrison, and Gayl Jones", in Simawe, Black Orpheus: Music in African American Fiction from the Harlem Renaissance to Toni Morrison. New York, NY: Garland; 2000. pp. 91–118.
  13. Ickstadt, Heinz, "The (Re)Construction of an American Cultural Identity in Literary Modernism", in Hagenbüchle, Raab, and Messmer, Negotiations of America's National Identity, II. Tübingen, Germany: Stauffenburg; 2000. pp. 206–28.

Articles on Cane in the collection Jean Toomer and the Harlem Renaissance

(Ed. Geneviève Fabre and Michel Feith, New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press; 2001.)

  1. Fabre, Geneviève, "Tight-Lipped 'Oracle': Around and Beyond Cane", pp. 1–17.
  2. Sollors, Werner, "Jean Toomer's Cane: Modernism and Race in Interwar America", pp. 18–37.
  3. Hutchinson, George, "Identity in Motion: Placing Cane", pp. 38–56.
  4. Grandjeat, Yves-Charles, "The Poetics of Passing in Jean Toomer's Cane", pp. 57–67.
  5. Clary, Françoise, "'The Waters of My Heart': Myth and Belonging in Jean Toomer's Cane", pp. 68–83.
  6. Coquet, Cécile, "Feeding the Soul with Words: Preaching and Dreaming in Cane", pp. 84–95.
  7. Michlin, Monica, "'Karintha': A Textual Analysis", pp. 96–108.
  8. Fabre, Geneviève, "Dramatic and Musical Structures in 'Harvest Song' and 'Kabnis': Toomer's Cane and the Harlem Renaissance", pp. 109–27.
  9. Nadell, Martha Jane, "Race and the Visual Arts in the Works of Jean Toomer and Georgia O'Keeffe", pp. 142–61.
  10. Soto, Michael, "Jean Toomer and Horace Liveright: Or, A New Negro Gets 'into the Swing of It'", pp. 162–87.
  11. Williams, Diana I., "Building the New Race: Jean Toomer's Eugenic Aesthetic", pp. 188–201.
  12. Fabre, Michel, "The Reception of Cane in France", pp. 202–14.

Journal articles

  1. Farebrother, Rachel, "Adventuring through the Pieces of a Still Unorganized Mosaic": Reading Jean Toomer's Collage Aesthetic in Cane, Journal of American Studies, December 2006; 40 (3): 503–21.
  2. Baldanzi, Jessica Hays, "Stillborns, Orphans, and Self-Proclaimed Virgins: Packaging and Policing the Rural Women of Cane", Genders, 2005; 42: 39 paragraphs.
  3. Banks, Kimberly, "'Like a Violin for the Wind to Play': Lyrical Approaches to Lynching by Hughes, Du Bois, and Toomer", African American Review, Fall 2004, 38 (3): 451–65.
  4. Whalan, Mark, "'Taking Myself in Hand': Jean Toomer and Physical Culture", Modernism/Modernity, 2003 Nov; 10 (4): 597–615.
  5. Ramsey, William M., "Jean Toomer's Eternal South", Southern Literary Journal, Fall 2003, 36 (1): 74–89.
  6. Hedrick, Tace, "Blood-Lines That Waver South: Hybridity, the 'South,' and American Bodies", Southern Quarterly: A Journal of the Arts in the South, Fall 2003, 42 (1): 39–52.
  7. Edmunds, Susan, "The Race Question and the 'Question of the Home': Revisiting the Lynching Plot in Jean Toomer's Cane", American Literature: A Journal of Literary History, Criticism, and Bibliography, March 2003, 75 (1): 141–68.
  8. Whalan, Mark, "Jean Toomer, Technology, and Race", Journal of American Studies, December 2002, 36 (3): 459–72.
  9. Battenfeld, Mary, "'Been Shapin Words T Fit M Soul': Cane, Language, and Social Change", Callaloo: A Journal of African-American and African Arts and Letters, Fall 2002, 25 (4): 1238–49.
  10. Da-Luz-Moreira, Paulo, "Macunaíma e Cane: Sociedades Multi-raciais além do Modernismo no Brasil e nos Estados Unidos", Tinta, Fall 2001, 5: 75–90.
  11. Scruggs, Charles, "Jean Toomer and Kenneth Burke and the Persistence of the Past", American Literary History, Spring 2001, 13 (1): 41–66.
  12. Shigley, Sally Bishop, "Recalcitrant, Revered, and Reviled: Women in Jean Toomer's Short Story Cycle, Cane", Short Story, Spring 2001, 9 (1): 88–98.
  13. Rand, Lizabeth A., "'I Am I': Jean Toomer's Vision beyond Cane", CLA Journal, September 2000, 44 (1): 43–64.
  14. Fike, Matthew A., "Jean Toomer and Okot p'Bitek in Alice Walker's In Search of Our Mothers' Gardens ", MELUS , Fall-Winter 2000, 25 (3-4): 141–60.
  15. Peckham, Joel B., "Jean Toomer's Cane: Self as Montage and the Drive toward Integration", American Literature: A Journal of Literary History, Criticism, and Bibliography, June 2000, 72 (2): 275–90.
  16. Webb, Jeff, "Literature and Lynching: Identity in Jean Toomer's Cane", ELH, Spring 2000, 67 (1): 205–28.
  17. Bus, Heiner, "Jean Toomer's Cane as a Swan Song", Journal of American Studies of Turkey, 2000 Spring; 11: 21–29.
  18. Harmon, Charles. "Cane, Race, and 'Neither/Norism'", Southern Literary Journal, Spring 2000, 32 (2): 90–101.
  19. Scruggs, Charles. "The Reluctant Witness: What Jean Toomer Remembered from Winesburg, Ohio ", Studies in American Fiction, 2000 Spring; 28 (1): 77–100.
  20. Kodat, Catherine Gunther, "To 'Flash White Light from Ebony': The Problem of Modernism in Jean Toomer's Cane", Twentieth Century Literature: A Scholarly and Critical Journal, Spring 2000, 46 (1): 1–19.

Related Research Articles

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Zora Neale Hurston</span> American author, anthropologist, filmmaker (1891–1960)

Zora Neale Hurston was an American writer, anthropologist, folklorist, and documentary filmmaker. She portrayed racial struggles in the early-20th-century American South and published research on Hoodoo and Caribbean Vodou. The most popular of her four novels is Their Eyes Were Watching God, published in 1937. She also wrote more than 50 short stories, plays, an autobiography, ethnographies, and many essays.

<i>Their Eyes Were Watching God</i> 1937 novel by Zora Neale Hurston

Their Eyes Were Watching God is a 1937 novel by American writer Zora Neale Hurston. It is considered a classic of the Harlem Renaissance, and Hurston's best known work. The novel explores protagonist Janie Crawford's "ripening from a vibrant, but voiceless, teenage girl into a woman with her finger on the trigger of her own destiny".

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Claude McKay</span> Jamaican American writer and poet (1889–1948)

Festus Claudius "Claude" McKay OJ was a Jamaican-American writer and poet. He was a central figure in the Harlem Renaissance.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Countee Cullen</span> American author (1903–1946)

Countee Cullen was an American poet, novelist, children's writer, and playwright, particularly well known during the Harlem Renaissance.

<i>The Crisis</i> Official magazine of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People

The Crisis is the official magazine of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP). It was founded in 1910 by W. E. B. Du Bois (editor), Oswald Garrison Villard, J. Max Barber, Charles Edward Russell, Kelly Miller, William Stanley Braithwaite, and Mary Dunlop Maclean. The Crisis has been in continuous print since 1910, and it is the oldest Black-oriented magazine in the world. Today, The Crisis is "a quarterly journal of civil rights, history, politics and culture and seeks to educate and challenge its readers about issues that continue to plague African Americans and other communities of color."

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Jessie R. Fauset</span> American writer, poet, and educator (1882–1961)

Jessie Redmon Fauset was an editor, poet, essayist, novelist, and educator. Her literary work helped sculpt African-American literature in the 1920s as she focused on portraying a true image of African-American life and history. Her black fictional characters were working professionals which was an inconceivable concept to American society during this time. Her story lines related to themes of racial discrimination, "passing", and feminism.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Sterling Allen Brown</span> American poet and academic (1901–1989)

Sterling Allen Brown was an American professor, folklorist, poet, and literary critic. He chiefly studied black culture of the Southern United States and was a professor at Howard University for most of his career. Brown was the first Poet Laureate of the District of Columbia.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Helene Johnson</span> American poet

Helene Johnson was an African-American poet during the Harlem Renaissance. She is remembered today for her poetry that captures both the challenges and the excitement of this era during her short-lived career.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Niggerati</span> Harlem renaissance intellectual group

Niggerati was the name used, with deliberate irony, by Wallace Thurman for the group of young African-American artists and intellectuals of the Harlem Renaissance. "Niggerati" is a portmanteau of "nigger" and "literati". The rooming house where he lived, and where that group often met, was similarly christened Niggerati Manor. The group included Zora Neale Hurston, Langston Hughes, and several of the people behind Thurman's journal FIRE!!, such as Richard Bruce Nugent, Jonathan Davis, Gwendolyn Bennett, and Aaron Douglas.

African American literature is the body of literature produced in the United States by writers of African descent. It begins with the works of such late 18th-century writers as Phillis Wheatley. Before the high point of enslaved people narratives, African American literature was dominated by autobiographical spiritual narratives. The genre known as slave narratives in the 19th century were accounts by people who had generally escaped from slavery, about their journeys to freedom and ways they claimed their lives. The Harlem Renaissance of the 1920s was a great period of flowering in literature and the arts, influenced both by writers who came North in the Great Migration and those who were immigrants from Jamaica and other Caribbean islands. African American writers have been recognized by the highest awards, including the Nobel Prize given to Toni Morrison in 1993. Among the themes and issues explored in this literature are the role of African Americans within the larger American society, African American culture, racism, slavery, and social equality. African-American writing has tended to incorporate oral forms, such as spirituals, sermons, gospel music, blues, or rap.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Jean Toomer</span> American poet and novelist

Jean Toomer was an American poet and novelist commonly associated with the Harlem Renaissance, though he actively resisted the association, and with modernism. His reputation stems from his novel Cane (1923), which Toomer wrote during and after a stint as a school principal at a black school in rural Sparta, Georgia. The novel intertwines the stories of six women and includes an apparently autobiographical thread; sociologist Charles S. Johnson called it "the most astonishingly brilliant beginning of any Negro writer of his generation". He resisted being classified as a Negro writer, as he identified as "American". For more than a decade Toomer was an influential follower and representative of the pioneering spiritual teacher G.I. Gurdjieff. Later in life he took up Quakerism.

<i>The New Negro</i> 1925 anthology edited by Alain Locke

The New Negro: An Interpretation (1925) is an anthology of fiction, poetry, and essays on African and African-American art and literature edited by Alain Locke, who lived in Washington, DC, and taught at Howard University during the Harlem Renaissance. As a collection of the creative efforts coming out of the burgeoning New Negro Movement or Harlem Renaissance, the book is considered by literary scholars and critics to be the definitive text of the movement. Part 1 of The New Negro: An Interpretation, titled "The Negro Renaissance", includes Locke's title essay "The New Negro", as well as nonfiction essays, poetry, and fiction by writers including Countee Cullen, Langston Hughes, Zora Neale Hurston, Claude McKay, Jean Toomer, and Eric Walrond.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Wallace Thurman</span> American novelist

Wallace Henry Thurman was an American novelist and screenwriter active during the Harlem Renaissance. He also wrote essays, worked as an editor, and was a publisher of short-lived newspapers and literary journals. He is best known for his novel The Blacker the Berry: A Novel of Negro Life (1929), which explores discrimination within the black community based on skin color, with lighter skin being more highly valued.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Richard Bruce Nugent</span> American writer and artist (1906–1987)

Richard Bruce Nugent, aka Richard Bruce and Bruce Nugent, was an American gay writer and painter in the Harlem Renaissance. Despite being a part of a group of many gay Harlem artists, Nugent was among the handful, who were publicly out. Recognized initially for the few short stories and published paintings, Nugent had a long productive career bringing to light the creative process of gay and black culture.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Georgia Douglas Johnson</span> American poet and playwright (1880–1966)

Georgia Blanche Douglas Camp Johnson, better known as Georgia Douglas Johnson, was a poet and playwright. She was one of the earliest female African-American playwrights, and an important figure of the Harlem Renaissance.

<i>Fire!!</i> 1926 African-American literary magazine in New York City

Fire!! was an African-American literary magazine published in New York City in 1926 during the Harlem Renaissance. The publication was started by Wallace Thurman, Zora Neale Hurston, Aaron Douglas, John P. Davis, Richard Bruce Nugent, Gwendolyn Bennett, Lewis Grandison Alexander, Countee Cullen, and Langston Hughes. The magazine's title referred to burning up old ideas, and Fire!! challenged the norms of the older Black generation while featuring younger authors. The publishers promoted a realistic style, with vernacular language and controversial topics such as homosexuality and prostitution. Many readers were offended, and some Black leaders denounced the magazine. The endeavor was plagued by debt, and its quarters burned down, ending the magazine after just one issue.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Harlem Renaissance</span> African-American cultural movement in New York City in the 1920s

The Harlem Renaissance was an intellectual and cultural revival of African-American music, dance, art, fashion, literature, theater, politics and scholarship centered in Harlem, Manhattan, New York City, spanning the 1920s and 1930s. At the time, it was known as the "New Negro Movement", named after The New Negro, a 1925 anthology edited by Alain Locke. The movement also included the new African-American cultural expressions across the urban areas in the Northeast and Midwest United States affected by a renewed militancy in the general struggle for civil rights, combined with the Great Migration of African-American workers fleeing the racist conditions of the Jim Crow Deep South, as Harlem was the final destination of the largest number of those who migrated north.

The Encyclopedia of the Harlem Renaissance by Sandra L. West and Aberjhani, is a 2003 encyclopedia of the lives, events, and culture of the Harlem Renaissance of the 1920s to 1940s. An ebook edition was published through Infobase Publishing in 2010.

<i>The New Negro: The Life of Alain Locke</i> 2018 biography of Alain LeRoy Locke written by Jeffrey C. Stewart

The New Negro: The Life of Alain Locke is a 2018 biography of Alain LeRoy Locke written by historian Jeffrey C. Stewart. The biography examines the life of Locke, an African-American activist and scholar who mentored many African-American intellectuals and writers and whom many see as the "father" of the Harlem Renaissance. Published by Oxford University Press, The New Negro won the 2018 National Book Award for Nonfiction and the 2019 Pulitzer Prize for Biography.

The Black Renaissance in D.C. was a social, intellectual, and cultural movement in Washington, D.C. that began in 1919 and continued into the late 1920s.

References

  1. As of March 2008, there were more than 100 scholarly articles on the book at the MLA Database.
  2. Toomer, Jean (May 10, 2018). "Harvest Song". Poetry Foundation.
  3. 1 2 McKay, Nellie. Jean Toomer, Artist: A Study of His Literary Life and Work. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1984.
  4. Toomer, "Why I Entered the Gurdjieff Work," Toomer Collection, Box 66, Folder 8, p. 29.
  5. 1 2 Jean Toomer to Waldo Frank, Toomer Collection, Box 1, Folder 3.
  6. Jean, Toomer (2010). Brother Mine: The Correspondence of Jean Toomer and Waldo Frank. Urbana, Chicago, Springfield: University of Illinois Press. p. 79.
  7. Jean Toomer to Sherwood Anderson, Toomer Collection, Box 1, Folder 1.
  8. Horace Liveright to Jean Toomer, August 29, 1923, Toomer Collection, Box I, Folder 6.
  9. Jean Toomer to Horace Liveright, September 5, 1923, Toomer Collection, Box 1, Folder 6.
  10. Turner, Darwin, ed. The Wayward and the Seeking: A Collection of Writings by Jean Toomer. Washington: Howard UP, 1980.
  11. Hughes, Langston, "The Negro Artist and the Racial Mountain", Angelyn Mitchell (ed.), Within the Circle: An Anthology of African American Literary Criticism from the Harlem Renaissance to the Present, Durham: Duke University Press, 1994. 55-59.
  12. 1 2 3 4 5 Durham, Frank (ed.), Studies in Cane. Columbus: Charles E. Merrill Publishing Company, 1971.
  13. Du Bois, W.E.B (Feb 1924). "The Younger Literary Movement". The Crisis: 162.
  14. Byerman, Keith E. (August 1, 2010). Seizing the Word: History, Art, and Self in the Work of W. E. B. Du Bois. The University of Georgia Press Athens & London: University of Georgia Press; Reprint edition. p. 106. ISBN   978-0820337753.
  15. Cottonmeyer, Tom (March 2011). "Cane" . Retrieved May 10, 2018.
  16. Byrd, Rudolph P. (March 2011). The World Has Changed: Conversations with Alice Walker. ReadHowYouWant.com. ISBN   9781459612402.
  17. Bone, Robert A. The Negro Novel in America. Yale University Press, 1965.
  18. Strauss, Gerald. "Cane." Masterplots II: African American Literature, Revised Edition (2008): 1-4. Literary Reference Center Plus. Web. October 1, 2012.
  19. "A Headstone for an Aunt: How Alice Walker Found Zora Neale Hurston - The Urchin Movement". www.urchinmovement.com.
  20. 1 2 Deborah G. Plant (2007). Zora Neale Hurston: A Biography of the Spirit. Greenwood Publishing Group. pp. 57–. ISBN   978-0-275-98751-0.
  21. Boyd, Valerie (2003). Wrapped in Rainbows: The Life of Zora Neale Hurston . New York: Scribner. p.  17. ISBN   0-684-84230-0.
  22. Hurston, Lucy Anne (2004). Speak, So You Can Speak Again: The Life of Zora Neale Hurston. New York: Doubleday. p. 5. ISBN   0-385-49375-4.
  23. Harold, Claudrena N. (July 12, 2011). "Deep in the Cane: The Southern Soul of Gil Scott-Heron". Southern Spaces. Retrieved May 10, 2018.
  24. Nielsen, Aldon Lynn (1997). Black chant : Languages of African-American postmodernism. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. p. 170. ISBN   0521555264.
  25. Beven, Mariella. "Album of the Week". Medium.com. Retrieved May 10, 2018.