First published in 1923, Jean Toomer s Cane is an innovative literary
work part drama, part poetry, part fiction 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."