Bøger af Jean Toomer

Jean Toomer (1894-1967) was a modernist writer, a member of the Harlem Renaissance, and briefly part of the literary and artistic community that grew up around Mabel Dodge Luhan in Taos, New Mexico. This book, a critical edition of a previously unpublished 1935 manuscript, makes A Drama of the Southwest available to readers for the first time. The play provides a vivid glimpse into the social world of the artists who mined Taos for creative and spiritual renewal in the early twentieth century, and editor Dekker provides cultural and literary historical context, arguing for Toomer's continuing creative power and significance at a time in his career that has been largely overlooked by critics.

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. This edition is printed on premium acid-free paper.

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."

First published in 1923, Cane is a significant work of Modernist fiction and a literary Goliath of the Harlem Renaissance. In this wholly original novel Jean Toomer highlights issues of class and caste in a three-part pastiche of poems, vignettes, and play-like stories. The audacious, non-traditional structure of the book reflects the prismatic nature of the material itself. Toomer's close observations during a stint as school principal in Sparta, Georgia, primarily informed what Houston A. Baker, Jr. calls a "mysterious brand of Southern psychological realism that has been matched only in the best work of William Faulkner." This edition includes Jean Toomer's essay, "The Crock of Problems," in which the author discusses race in America and his own diverse ethnic heritage, and an extensive biographical note.

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.

Landmark Harlem Renaissance work combines poetry, drama, and storytelling to contrast African-American life in the rural South with that of the urban North. "I love it passionately." - Alice Walker.

The Harlem Renaissance writer's innovative and groundbreaking novel depicting African American life in the South and North, with a foreword by National Book Foundation 5 Under 35 honoree Zinzi ClemmonsJean Toomer's Cane is one of the most significant works to come out of the Harlem Renaissance, and is considered to be a masterpiece in American modernist literature because of its distinct structure and style. First published in 1923 and told through a series of vignettes, Cane uses poetry, prose, and play-like dialogue to create a window into the varied lives of African Americans living in the rural South and urban North during a time when Jim Crow laws pervaded and racism reigned. While critically acclaimed and known today as a pioneering text of the Harlem Renaissance, the book did not gain as much popularity as other works written during the period. Fellow Harlem Renaissance writer Langston Hughes believed Cane's lack of a wider readership was because it didn't reinforce the stereotypes often associated with African Americans during the time, but portrayed them in an accurate and entirely human way, breaking the mold and laying the groundwork for how African Americans are depicted in literature. For the first time in Penguin Classics, this edition of Cane features a new introduction, suggestions for further reading, and notes by scholar George Hutchinson, and National Book Award Foundation 5 Under 35 novelist Zinzi Clemmons contributes a foreword.

This volume is the only collected edition of poems by Jean Toomer, the enigmatic American writer, Gurdjieffian guru, and Quaker convert who is perhaps best known for his 1923 lyrical narrative Cane. The fifty-five poems here -- most of them previously unpublished -- chart a fascinating evolution of artistic consciousness.The book is divided into sections reflecting four distinct periods of creativity in Toomer's career. The Aesthetic period includes Imagist, Symbolist, and other experimental pieces, such as "e;Five Vignettes,"e; while "e;Georgia Dusk"e; and the newly discovered poem "e;Tell Me"e; come from Toomer' s Ancestral Consciousness period in the early 1920s. "e;The Blue Meridian"e; and other Objective Consciousness poems reveal the influence of idealist philosopher Georges Gurdjieff. Among the works of this period the editor presents a group of local color poems picturing the landscape of the American Southwest, including "e;Imprint for Rio Grande."e; "e;It Is Everywhere,"e; another newly discovered poem, celebrates America and democratic idealism. The Quaker religious philosophy of Toomer's final years is demonstrated in such Christian Existential works as "e;They Are Not Missed"e; and "e;To Gurdjieff Dying."e;Robert Jones's clear and comprehensive introduction examines the major poems in this volume and serves as a guide through the stages of Toomer's evolution as an artist and thinker. The Collected Poems of Jean Toomer will prove essential to Toomer's admirers as well as to scholars and students of modern poetry, Afro-American literature, and American studies.

A masterpiece of the Harlem Renaissance and a canonical work in both the American and the African American literary traditions, Cane is now available in a revised and expanded Norton Critical Edition.

Presents a literary friendship, preserved in letters.

This collection of Toomer's previously unpublished writings includes correspondence, poetry, short stories and essays.