Jean Toomer's Cane was the first major text of the Harlem Renaissance and the first important modernist text by an African-American writer. It powerfully depicts the terror in the history of American race relations, a public world of lynchings, race riots, and Jim Crow, and a private world of internalized conflict over identity and race which mirrored struggles in the culture at large. Toomer's own life reflected that internal conflict, and he has been an ambiguous figure in literary history, an author who wrote a text that had a tremendous impact on African American authors but who eventually tried to distance himself from Cane and from his identification as a black writer.
In Jean Toomer and the Terrors of American History, Charles Scruggs and Lee VanDemarr examine original sources—Toomer's rediscovered early writings on politics and race, his extensive correspondence with Waldo Frank, and unpublished portions of his autobiographies—to show how the cultural wars of the 1920s influenced the shaping of Toomer's book and his subsequent efforts to escape the racial definitions of American society. That those definitions remain crucial for American society even today is one reason Toomer's work continues to fascinate and to influence contemporary writers and readers.
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"Much has been written about Toomer since the 1960s, but no one has taken the trouble to establish the unreliability of Toomer's autobiographical statements. . . . The results of this meticulously researched reconstruction are breathtaking and will change Toomer studies forever. . . . A truly exceptional piece of literary and historical scholarship."—Vera M. Kutzinski, Yale University
About the Author
Charles Scruggs is Professor of English at the University of Arizona. Lee VanDemarr is a freelance writer and editor.
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Front Cover | Front Flap | Table of Contents | First Pages | Index | Back Flap | Back Cover | Surprise Me!
Inside This Book
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First Sentence:
Sparta, Georgia, is located almost at the center of Hancock County, a little over one hundred miles southeast of Atlanta, seventy-five miles southwest of Augusta. Read the first page Key Phrases - Statistically Improbable Phrases (SIPs): (learn more)
mulatto aristocracy, crudest melodrama, buried cultures, mulatto elite, black doorman, sawdust pile, alley life, uplift ideology, undated letter Key Phrases - Capitalized Phrases (CAPs): (learn more)
New York, Waldo Frank, United States, Seventh Street, Father John, Seven Arts, Box Seat, Sherwood Anderson, Civil War, Hancock County, Mary Austin, Harvest Song, Mame Lamkins, Natalie Mann, Randolph Bourne, Song of the Son, Van Wyck Brooks, Bob Stone, Gorham Munson, Horace Liveright, Jim Crow, Trans-National America, Hart Crane, Howard Theater, Lola Ridge New!
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Front Cover | Front Flap | Table of Contents | First Pages | Index | Back Flap | Back Cover | Surprise Me!
Sparta, Georgia, is located almost at the center of Hancock County, a little over one hundred miles southeast of Atlanta, seventy-five miles southwest of Augusta. Read the first page Key Phrases - Statistically Improbable Phrases (SIPs): (learn more)
mulatto aristocracy, crudest melodrama, buried cultures, mulatto elite, black doorman, sawdust pile, alley life, uplift ideology, undated letter Key Phrases - Capitalized Phrases (CAPs): (learn more)
New York, Waldo Frank, United States, Seventh Street, Father John, Seven Arts, Box Seat, Sherwood Anderson, Civil War, Hancock County, Mary Austin, Harvest Song, Mame Lamkins, Natalie Mann, Randolph Bourne, Song of the Son, Van Wyck Brooks, Bob Stone, Gorham Munson, Horace Liveright, Jim Crow, Trans-National America, Hart Crane, Howard Theater, Lola Ridge New!
Books on Related Topics | Concordance | Text Stats Browse Sample Pages:
Front Cover | Front Flap | Table of Contents | First Pages | Index | Back Flap | Back Cover | Surprise Me!
Citations (learn more)
5
books
cite this book:
- Mestizo Modernism: Race, Nation and Identity in Latin American Culture, 1900-1940 by Tace Hedrick in Back Matter
- Composing Urban History and the Constitution of Civic Identities (Woodrow Wilson Center Press) by John J. Czaplicka on page 241
- Race (Transitions) by Brian Niro in Back Matter
- Black Writers, White Publishers: Marketplace Politics in Twentieth- Century African American Literature by John K. Young in Back Matter
- Spectres of 1919: Class and Nation in the Making of the New Negro by Barbara Foley in Back Matter
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