Books with title Cane

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.

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.

"[Cane] has been reverberating in me to an astonishing degree. I love it passionately; could not possibly exit without it." — Alice Walker "A breakthrough in prose and poetical writing …. This book should be on all readers' and writers' desks and in their minds." — Maya Angelou Hailed by critics for its literary experimentation and vivid portrayal of African-American characters and culture, Cane represents one of the earliest expressions of the Harlem Renaissance. Combining poetry, drama, and storytelling, it contrasts life in an African-American community in the rural South with that of the urban North. Author Jean Toomer (1894–1967) drew upon his experiences as a teacher in rural Georgia to create a variety of Southern psychological realism that ranks alongside the best works of William Faulkner. The book's three-part structure, ranging from South to North and back again, is united by its focus on the lives of African-American men and women in a world of bigotry, violence, passion, and tenderness.

'Cane' is a novel and possibly the best-known work by Jean Toomer. The novel is built up in a series of vignettes that deal with the origins and experiences of African Americans in the United States. The vignettes picture the South in sketches, short stories and poems by. A book whose tap roots run deep in the Southern soil, and whose music sways our emotions as only primitive desires can.

Cane' explores spiritual and emotional frustration, failure of basic communication between individuals, and repression of natural energies. It reveals the chaos of contemporary black American life and calls for a spiritual awakening. A land mark novel that changed the way America looked at black writers. I love it passionately; could not possibly exist without it. — Alice Walker This book should be on all readers' and writers' desks and in their minds. — Maya Angelou [Toomer avoided] the pitfalls of propaganda and moralizing on the one hand and the snares of a false and hollow race pride on the other hand. — Montgomery Gregory

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.About the author- Jean Toomer (born Nathan Pinchback Toomer, December 26, 1894 – March 30, 1967) was an African-American poet and novelist commonly associated with the Harlem Renaissance, though he actively resisted the association, and modernism. His reputation stems from his only book, the 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, saying that he was American.Toomer continued to write poetry, short stories and essays. His first wife died soon after the birth of their daughter. After he married again in 1934, Toomer moved with his family from New York to Doylestown, Pennsylvania. There he became a member of the Religious Society of Friends (also known as Quakers) and retired from public life. His papers are held by the Beinecke Rare Book Library at Yale University.

A striking mosaic of prose, poetry, and dramatic dialogue, Jean Toomer’s Cane has come to be considered a masterpiece of the Harlem Renaissance. Structured as a series of vignettes ripe with longing, passion, violence, and revenge, the haunting novel gives a powerful voice to the interior lives of African Americans in the rural South and urban North.Championed for its unsparing honesty and psychological insight by such luminaries as Langston Hughes, Richard Wright, Alice Walker, and Maya Angelou, Cane shines as a beacon to generations of African American writers who followed.Revised edition: Previously published as Cane, this edition of Cane (AmazonClassics Edition) includes editorial revisions.

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 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.

2018 Reprint of 1923 Edition. Cane 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 High Modernism. 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.”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."