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Cane

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About this listen

First published in 1923, Jean Toomer's Cane is an innovative literary work powerfully evoking black life in the South. Rich in imagery, Toomer's impressionistic, sometimes surrealistic sketches of Southern rural and urban life are permeated by visions of smoke, sugarcane, dusk, and fire; the northern world is pictured as a harsher reality of asphalt streets. This iconic work of American literature is published with a new afterword by Rudolph Byrd of Emory University and Henry Louis Gates Jr. of Harvard University, who provide groundbreaking biographical information on Toomer, place his writing within the context of American modernism and the Harlem Renaissance, and examine his shifting claims about his own race and his pioneering critique of race as a scientific or biological concept.

©1923 Boni & Liveright, renewed 1951 Jean Toomer; Afterword © 2011 Rudolph P. Byrd and Henry Louis Gates, Jr., reprinted from Cane: Authoritive Text, Contexts, Criticism; "Toomer" by Elizabeth Alexander, © 2010 Elizabeth Alexander (P)2013 Dreamscape Media, LLC Classics

What the critics say

"This book should be on all readers' and writers' desks and in their minds." (Maya Angelou)
"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)
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