Synopses & Reviews
"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 ), 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 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.
Synopsis
Darwin T. Turner's "Introduction" (to the 1975 Liveright edition ofCane), reprinted here, presents the historical and literary backgrounds of the work, as well as additional biographical information on Toomer. "Criticism," both contemporary and recent, onCane 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.
Synopsis
Originally published in 1923, Caneis considered a literary masterpiece of the Harlem Renaissance.
Synopsis
A masterpiece of the Harlem Renaissance and a canonical work in both the American and the African American literary traditions, Caneis now available in a revised and expanded Norton Critical Edition.
Synopsis
Originally published in 1923, 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 . It is an innovative literary work--part drama, part poetry, part fiction.
About the Author
Jean Toomerwas born in 1894 in Washington, D.C., the son of educated blacks of Creole stock. Literature was his first love and he regularly contributed avant garde poetry and short stories to such magazines as Dial, Broom, Secession, Double Dealer, and Little Review. After a literary apprenticeship in New York, Toomer taught school in rural Georgia. His experiences there led to the writing of Cane.Henry Louis Gates Jr.(Ph.D. Cambridge) is Alphonse Fletcher University Professor and Director, W. E. B. Du Bois Institute for African and African American Research, at Harvard University. He is the author of Figures in Black: Words, Signs, and the Racial Self; The Signifying Monkey: A Theory of Afro-American Criticism; Loose Canons: Notes on the Culture Wars; Colored People: A Memoir; The Future of Race(with Cornel West); Wonders of the African World; Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Black Man; and America Behind the Color Line: Dialogues with African Americans. He is general editor (with the late Nellie Y. McKay) of The Norton Anthology of African American Literature; editor-in-chief of the Oxford African American Studies Center (online); editor of The African-American Century(with Cornel West); Encarta Africana(with Kwame Anthony Appiah); and The Bondwoman’s Narrativeby Hannah Craft; African American National Biography(with Evelyn Brooks Higginbotham) and The Annotated Uncle Tom’s Cabin(with Hollis Robbins). For PBS, Professor Gates has written and produced several documentaries, among them African American Lives, series 1 and 2, and America Behind the Color Line.