Books with title Cane

First published in 1923, Jean Toomer's Cane is an innovative literary work 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 a classic of both American modernism and the Harlem Renaissance, and challenges the idea of race as a scientific or biological concept.

The book 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 between vignettes, the vignettes are mostly freestanding, tied to the other vignettes thematically and contextually more than through specific plot details.

“Cane . . . exerted a powerful influence over the Harlem Renaissance”—The New York TimesCane is a collection of short stories, poems, and dramas, written by Harlem Renaissance author Jean Toomer in 1923. The stories focus around African-American culture in both the North and the South during times when racism and Jim Crow laws still abounded. Vignettes of the lives of various African-American characters tell what it was like to live both in the rural areas of Georgia and the urban streets of the northern cities. The book was heralded as an influential part of the Harlem Renaissance and, at the time, influenced artists of every background. Authors, dramatists, and even jazz musicians could find influence and inspiration in the pages of Cane’s work. Both Zora Neale Hurston and Langston Hughes themselves visited Sparta, Georgia, after reading Toomer’s work. Unfortunately, the white public did not react well to Cane, and the sales dropped. The book did not become revered as the classic work it is today until the Civil Rights Movement in the 1960s. Now you can read this new edition of what is considered one of the best works of the Harlem Renaissance.

Karintha, at twelve, was a wild flash that told the other folks just what it was to live. At sunset, when there was no wind, and the pinesmoke 2from over by the sawmill hugged the earth, and you couldnt see more than a few feet in front, her sudden darting past you was a bit of vivid color, like a black bird that flashes in light. With the other children one could hear, some distance off, their feet flopping in the two-inch dust. Karintha’s running was a whir. It had the sound of the red dust that sometimes makes a spiral in the road. At dusk, during the hush just after the sawmill had closed down, and before any of the women had started their supper-getting-ready songs, her voice, high-pitched, shrill, would put one’s ears to itching. But no one ever thought to make her stop because of it. She stoned the cows, and beat her dog, and fought the other children... Even the preacher, who caught her at mischief, told himself that she was as innocently lovely as a November cotton flower. - Taken from "Cane" written by Jean Toomer

Largely ignored upon its initial publication in 1923, Jean Toomer’s Cane is now regarded as a precursor of the Harlem Renaissance and a masterpiece of modernist American literature.Some have called Cane a prose poem, but it truly defies classification. Toomer weaves together short stories, poetry, and drama to sketch a provocative and haunting portrait of (mostly) southern African American life that is as deep and rich as the cane fields that feature prominently in the book. Born in Washington, DC, the grandson of a former governor of Louisiana, Toomer attended schools in Wisconsin, Chicago, and New York. He began writing some of the pieces that make up Cane as early as 1918, but it was a stint as principal of a black agricultural institute in Sparta, Georgia, in 1921-22 that inspired his greatest work. After publishing Cane, Toomer would never publish anything like it again—no one has. He died shortly before Cane was “rediscovered” in the late 1960s. After being out of print for four decades, Cane finally began receiving the attention that it deserved. Alice Walker has said of Cane “I love it passionately” and Henry Louis Gates, Jr. has written that “Cane is arguably the most sophisticated work of literature created over the course of the Harlem Renaissance.”

First published in 1923, “Cane” by Jean Toomer, is one of the most significant books to come out of the Harlem Renaissance. Jean Toomer, born Nathaniel Pinchback Toomer in Washington D. C. in 1894, was raised by his mother and her wealthy parents after being abandoned by his father as a baby. While he spent much of his life on the East Coast and at various colleges in Chicago and Wisconsin, he worked for several months in 1921 as a principal at a newly formed agricultural and industrial school for blacks in rural Sparta, Georgia, near where his father had lived. This experience gave Toomer a new-found understanding of the struggle of African-Americans in a society full of white supremacy and racial violence. At the end of his time in the South, Toomer began writing “Cane” and based the book on both the rural and urban lives of blacks in early 20th century America. The novel is organized into a series of loosely and thematically related vignettes and contains numerous literary styles, such as prose, poetry, and dramatic play-like passages of dialogue. “Cane” is a classic masterpiece of modernism and an important testament on the lives and struggles of African-Americans in the early part of the 20th century.

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 between vignettes, the vignettes are mostly freestanding, tied to the other vignettes thematically and contextually more than through specific plot details. The ambitious, nontraditional structure of the novel – and its later influence on future generations of writers – have helped Cane gain status as a classic of modernism. Several of the vignettes have been excerpted or anthologized in literary collections; the poetic passage "Harvest Song" has been included in multiple Norton poetry anthologies. The poem opens with the line: "I am a reaper whose muscles set at sundown."

A literary masterpiece of the Harlem Renaissance, Cane is a powerful work of innovative fiction evoking black life in the South. The sketches, poems, and stories of black rural and urban life that make up Cane are rich in imagery. Visions of smoke, sugarcane, dusk, and flame permeate the Southern landscape: the Northern world is pictured as a harsher reality of asphalt streets. Impressionistic, sometimes surrealistic, the pieces are redolent of nature and Africa, with sensuous appeals to eye and ear.

Originally published in 1923, Cane is a literary masterpiece of the Harlem Renaissance. The growing interest in African-American literature that began in the 1960's led to the rediscovery of earlier African-American writers, one of whom is Jean Toomer, author of Cane. It is an innovative literary work―part drama, part poetry, part fiction. "Backgrounds" contains generous excerpts from Jean Toomer's correspondence with fellow writers Sherwood Anderson, Waldo Frank, and Allen Tate, and with his publisher, Horace Liveright. Darwin T. Turner's "Introduction" (to the 1975 Liveright edition of Cane), reprinted here, presents the historical and literary backgrounds of the work, as well as additional biographical information on Toomer. "Criticism", both contemporary and recent, on Cane and Toomer is wide-ranging and includes essays by W. E. B. Du Bois, Gorham B. Munson, Robert Bone, Patricia Watkins, Lucinda H. MacKethan, Nellie Y. McKay, and Darwin T. Turner.