Cane | Author Biography
It is somewhat ironic that Jean Toomer is remembered as the writer of one of the greatest novels ever written by a black author, because during his lifetime he only published one significant book and he spent very little time among blacks. His mother's family was rich and powerful in Louisiana, where her father, Pickney B. S. Pinchback, had been the only African American ever to have served as acting governor. Toomer's father, Nathan Toomer Sr., was the son of a slave. His father left soon before Nathan Eugene Toomer was born on December 26, 1894, in Washington, D.C. The author was called Eugene Pinchback during his childhood, and was raised in affluent areas of New Orleans and Washington, where he hardly felt the effects of society's racist institutions until he was in high school.
In 1914, he enrolled in the University of Wisconsin to major in agriculture, but quit after he found himself unable to win the race for the class presidency. Following that, he attended the Massachusetts College of Agriculture, then the American College of Physical Training in Chicago. In 1916, he became a devotee of socialism and gave lectures on the subject in a room that he rented out. Turned down by the Army during World War I in 1917, he became a Ford salesman in Chicago, then a substitute physical education teacher in the Milwaukee School System. In 1918 he went to work for a manufacturing company in New York, where he began to socialize in literary circles.
From 1920 to 1922 Toomer wrote passionately, filling a trunk with poems, essays, short stories, and letters. During this time he made the acquaintance of Waldo Frank, a famous novelist of the time who became his friend and mentor. During March of 1921 Toomer filled in as an administrator at the Sparta Agricultural and Industrial Institute in Hancock County, Georgia, where he experienced the lives of rural blacks for the first time, an experience that strongly influenced Cane. That summer, feeling that he did not have enough material, he and Frank traveled the South together, with Frank posing as a black man: under the segregated laws of the early 1900s, they both could have been prosecuted or killed if people found out that a black man and a white man were travelling together.
After Cane, Toomer did not write about the African-American experience anymore. Being so light-skinned that he was often mistaken for being Indian, Oriental, or Mediterranean, he felt that the American black experience was not relevant to him: publishers, however, were only interested in his views regarding the black experience. His long friendship with Waldo Frank ended when he had an affair with Frank's wife. He became involved in different types of spiritualism, especially the teachings of Greek philosopher Georges Gurdjieff, whose Institute for Harmonious Development Toomer worked to popularize in America. His first wife died during childbirth a year after they married; his second marriage lasted more than thirty years, until his death on March 30, 1967, in Doylestown, Pennsylvania. Toomer published some poetry and essays, but never another novel.
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