Cane (NCE) (Paper) (Norton Critical Editions) - Softcover

Toomer, J

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0393956008 ISBN 13: 9780393956009

Publisher: W. W. Norton & Co., 1988

Synopsis

"Backgrounds" contains generous excerpts from Jean Toomer'scorrespondence with fellow writers Sherwood Anderson, Waldo Frank, andAllen Tate, and with his publisher, Horace Liveright.

Darwin T. Turner's "Introduction" (to the 1975 Liveright edition ofCane), reprinted here, presents the historical and literary backgroundsof the work, as well as additional biographical information on Toomer.

"Criticism", both contemporary and recent, on Cane and Toomer iswide-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.

About this title

Review

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. --Robert A. Bone, The Negro Novel in America"

About the Author

Jean Toomer (1894-1967) was born 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. Darwin T. Turner was professor of English at the University of Iowa and head of its Afro-American World Studies Program. He wrote extensively about Jean Toomer. He was the author of In a Minor Chord: Three Afro-American Writers and Their Search for Identity, Katharsis, and Nathaniel Hawthorne's "The Scarlet Letter." He edited, among other books, The Wayward and the Seeking: Selected Writings by Jean Toomer, Afro-American Writers, and Black American Literature: Essays, Poetry, Fiction, Drama. Professor Turner's poems were published in numerous journals, as were his many articles and reviews, most concerned with Afro-American writers.

Edition details

• Publisher: W. W. Norton & Co.
• Publication date: 1988
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0393956008
• ISBN 13: 9780393956009
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 256