Cane (Norton Critical Editions). This item is unavailable.Cane (Norton Critical Editions)

"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.

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"