Jean Toomer

Nathan Pinchback Toomer was born in Washington, D.C., in 1894 and raised largely in the home of his grandfather, P. B. S. Pinchback, who during Reconstruction had briefly served as governor of Louisiana. Of mixed ancestry, he lived at different times in white and black neighborhoods and later resisted being classified by race at all, calling himself simply an American. He attended several colleges without taking a degree and tried many jobs while reading widely and beginning to write. In 1921 he spent two months as a substitute principal at a school in Sparta, Georgia, where the folk songs and spirituals of the rural black South moved him deeply. Out of this experience came Cane (1923), a book of poems, sketches and drama that writers of the Harlem Renaissance hailed as a breakthrough. Toomer then turned to the spiritual teachings of George Gurdjieff and later to the Quakers, writing essays and poems that found few readers. He never published another major work of fiction. He died in Pennsylvania in 1967, shortly before Cane was rediscovered.

Jean Toomer is also an author in the library: author page and works.

Faith: For more than a decade a follower of the spiritual teacher G. I. Gurdjieff; he later joined the Religious Society of Friends (Quakers). Source: Wikipedia