Beschreibung:

TOOMER, Jean (1894–1967). Cane. With a foreword by Waldo Frank. New York: Boni and Liveright, [1923]. 8vo. Original grey cloth stamped in orange and black (spine gently sunned, else fine). FIRST EDITION, of the author’s first novel and his most famous work that would become the pinnacle of the Harlem Renaissance and Modernism. A noted writer of the Harlem Renaissance, Jean Toomer wrote Cane while principal at a rural agricultural and industrial school in Sparta, Georgia. The book reflects the tension Toomer often felt about his mixed–race heritage, as he found himself identifying with the plight of black workers in the American South while still passing mainly as a white man in his day-to-day life. Describing the book’s design as “a circle,” Cane discusses the black experience as seen by laborers in the rural South, life in the urban North, and finally as a black Northerner temporarily living in the South. Socialist writer Waldo Frank played a large role in the book’s publication, even writing the book’s foreword. Unbeknownst to Frank at the time, Toomer was carrying on an affair with Frank’s wife, Margaret Naumburg. The affair was revealed to Frank shortly before the book was due to be published. Despite being well received by white and black critics alike, Cane sold poorly (with some speculation that Frank himself used his literary connections to sabotage the book’s print run as revenge for Toomer’s affair with his wife). Langston Hughes suggested in his 1923 review that this was in part because of the book’s refusal to reinforce popular African American stereotypes, while others have speculated that Toomer’s biracial identity made it difficult for him to identify with the African American experience. Indeed, prior to the book’s publication Horace Liveright suggested that Toomer discuss in more detail his mixed–race ancestry, and Toomer fired back an angry response in which he said that his racial background had no bearing on the book, and he would not allow any discussion of it in promotional materials. The book was rediscovered during the 1960s and has since been accepted as a literary classic of the Harlem Renaissance.