Cane (Penguin Classics) - Softcover

Toomer, Jean

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0143133675 ISBN 13: 9780143133674

Publisher: Penguin Classics, 2019

Synopsis

Jean 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 due to 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.

About this title

Review:

"[Toomer] is American literature's greatest, most enduring enigma. . . . But here, in this lush, bleak book, in his evocation of the world as it is instead of how it ought to be, something hardier, more useful is conveyed -- of the possibilities for epiphany, the reliable consolations of love and revenge. And in his style -- this pastiche of poem, autobiography and fable -- there is an integration of the self that the life never afforded."
--Parul Sehgal, The New York Times

"Over the past 95 years this Harlem Renaissance 'experiment' -- a mosaic of poems, vignettes and short stories, many of these last being shocking studies of loneliness and the longing for love -- has risen from relative obscurity to become what it always was, a groundbreaking work of 20th-century American literature."
--Michael Dirda, The Washington Post

About the Author:

Jean Toomer (1894-1967) was an African American novelist and poet. The son of a mixed-race freedman born into slavery who later joined ranks with the mulatto elite in Washington DC, Toomer's lighter skin and upbringing in all-white schools and neighbourhoods caused him to not to identify as black or white but rather an American who represented a new mixed race. Despite his refusal to be bound or classified by race, Toomer is considered one of the most important African American writers to come from the Harlem Renaissance.

About this edition

• Publisher: Penguin Classics
• Publication date: 2019
• ISBN 10: 0143133675
• ISBN 13: 9780143133674
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 272