Cane

Jean Toomer's Cane is one of the most significant works to come out of the Harlem Renaissance and is considered to be a masterpiece in American modernist literature due to its distinct structure and style. First published in 1923 and told through a series of vignettes, Cane uses poetry, prose and play-like dialogue to create a window into the varied lives of African Americans living in the rural South and urban North during a time when Jim Crow laws pervaded and racism reigned.

Reviews

“[Toomer] is American literature’s greatest, most enduring enigma. . . . But here, in this lush, bleak book, in his evocation of the world as it is instead of how it ought to be, something hardier, more useful is conveyed — of the possibilities for epiphany, the reliable consolations of love and revenge. And in his style — this pastiche of poem, autobiography and fable — there is an integration of the self that the life never afforded.”
—Parul Sehgal, The New York Times

“Over the past 95 years this Harlem Renaissance ‘experiment’ — a mosaic of poems, vignettes and short stories, many of these last being shocking studies of loneliness and the longing for love — has risen from relative obscurity to become what it always was, a groundbreaking work of 20th-century American literature.”
—Michael Dirda, The Washington Post