Jean Toomer

"Considered deeply controversial because of his experimental writing style and complicated racial heritage, Jean Toomer was a major figure of the Harlem Renaissance and in the twentieth-century modernist movement. Toomer has been the focus of much research, and over the years, his letters have been widely cited by specialists on the literature of the period." "The Letters of Jean Toomer, 1919-1924, is the first-ever annotated collection of the author's correspondence. The letters included in the volume - most of which are in the Beinecke Library at Yale University - were written in the five years surrounding Toomer's publication of his seminal work, Cane. As such, they lend unique insight into the life, aesthetics, politics, and work of a central figure in American literature of the early twentieth century." "Mark Whalen's compilation offers a vital document for understanding the contexts, intellectual debates, and tensions undergirding Toomer's work, including his simultaneous feelings of attraction to and estrangement from rural southern life, the influence of technology on race and urban existence in America and the contradictory pulls of folk culture and modernist experimentation. The collection also charts the motives underlying Toomer's abandonment of the style that distinguished Cane, and his growing fascination with the teachings of the mystic G.I. Gurdjieff in 1924"--Jacket.

For other editions, see Author Catalog.

This is a collection of short stories and poems written about the lives of African Americans in the 1920s.

Selections include: ... - [Young Goodman Brown]( by Nathaniel Hawthorne ... - [An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge]( by Ambrose Bierce ... - [A Pair of Silk Stockings]( by Kate Chopin - [The Cask of Amontillado]( - [Fall of the House of Usher]( - [The Glass Menagerie]( by Tennesse Williams

10th grade

Grade 11

"Jean Toomer (1894–1967) was a modernist writer, a member of the Harlem Renaissance, and briefly part of the literary and artistic community that grew up around Mabel Dodge Luhan in Taos, New Mexico. This book, a critical edition of a previously unpublished 1935 manuscript, makes A Drama of the Southwest available to readers for the first time. The play provides a vivid glimpse into the social world of the artists who mined Taos for creative and spiritual renewal in the early twentieth century, and editor Dekker provides cultural and literary historical context, arguing for Toomer’s continuing creative power and significance at a time in his career that has been largely overlooked by critics"--Publisher's website.

"Unusually valuable for the history of modernism. This fascinating correspondence will create further interest in Toomer, Frank, and the mixed-race environment of the 1920s."--Linda Wagner-Martin, author of Telling Women's Lives: The New Biography. "Readers and scholars will welcome this fully annotated and contextually framed collection of the alchemy that comes from the significant voices of Jean Toomer and Waldo Frank. This volume brings long-needed light to two figures whose reputations and influence on American letters have been skewed by the lack of mutually illuminating materials, until now."--Steve H. Cook, editor of The Correspondence Between Hart Crane and Waldo Frank. The friendship of Jean Toomer and Waldo Frank was one of the most emotionally intense, racially complicated, and aesthetically significant relationships in the history of American literary modernism, Waldo Frank was an established white writer who advised and assisted the younger African American Jean Toomer as he pursued a literary career. They met in 1920, began corresponding regularly in 1922, and were estranged by the end of 1923, the same year that Toomer published his ambitiously modernist debut novel, Cane. While individual letters between Frank and Toomer have been published separately on occasion, they have always been presented out of context. This volume presents for the first time their entire correspondence in chronological order, comprising 121 letters ranging from200 to 800 words each. Kathleen Pfeiffer annotates and introduces the letters, framing the correspondence and explaining the literary and historical allusions in the letters themselves. Reading like an epistolary novel, Brother Mine captures the sheer emotional force of the story that unfolds in these letters: two men discover an extraordinary friendship, and their intellectual and emotional intimacy takes shape before our eyes. This unprecedented collection preserves the raw honesty of their exchanges, together with the developing drama of their ambition, their disappointments, their assessment of their world, and ultimately, the betrayal that ended the friendship. --Book Jacket.