Cane, published in 1923, is Jean Toomer's experimental book of sketches, poems and drama about African American life in the rural South and the urban North, and it is regarded as one of the founding works of the Harlem Renaissance. Toomer, raised mainly in Washington, D.C., spent two months in 1921 as a substitute principal at a school in Sparta, Georgia, where he heard the folk songs and spirituals of the black peasantry and felt that this culture was passing away.
Jean Toomer · CatalogJean ToomerJean Toomer · CatalogJean Toomer (1894-1967), born in Washington, D.C., was a poet and novelist of the Harlem Renaissance whose only book of fiction, Cane (1923), drew on his months teaching in rural Georgia.Cane
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Jean Toomer
Short biography: Jean Toomer in Great Lives