Cane | Journey toward Black Art: Jean Toomer's Cane
In the following essay excerpt, Houston A. Baker, Jr. asserts that with Cane, Toomer transcended black American literature of the 1920s to present a "thorough delineation of the black situation."
William Stanley Braithwaite's "The Negro in American Literature," concludes with the rhapsodic assertion that "Cane is a book of gold and bronze, of dusk and flame, of ecstasy and pain, and Jean Toomer is a bright morning star of a new day of the race in literature." Written in 1924, Braithwaite's statement reflects the energy and excess, the vibrancy and hope of a generation of young black authors who set out in the 1920s to express their "individual dark-skinned selves without fear or shame." They were wooed by...
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