Toomer, Jean (Vol. 1) - Toomer, Jean 1894–1967
Toomer, Jean 1894–1967
Toomer, a Black American, is most widely recognized as the author of Cane. He also published short stories, poems, and sketches in magazines.
Jean Toomer's Cane … is an important American novel. By far the most impressive product of the Negro Renaissance, it ranks with Richard Wright's Native Son and Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man as a measure of the Negro novelist's highest achievement. Jean Toomer belongs to that first rank of writers who use words almost as a plastic medium, shaping new meanings from an original and highly personal style. Since stylistic innovation requires great technical dexterity, Toomer displays a concern for technique which is fully two decades in advance of the period. While his contemporaries of the Harlem School were still experimenting with a crude literary realism, Toomer had progressed beyond the naturalistic novel to "the higher realism of the emotions," to symbol,...
[The entire page is 603 words long]
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