Cane was a phenomenal critical success from its first printing, but it was a commercial failure, with fewer than 5000 copies published during Jean Toomer' s lifetime. Some biographers and critics refer to this fact to explain why the author never followed it up with another novel. It was published in 1923, a time when the literary world was alive with writers like Toomer who experimented with traditional narrative styles, and the critics were very receptive to the novel's uniqueness, in some cases even overenthusiastic. Darwin T. Turner, who has written much about Toomer's career, captured some of the enthusiasm of the early praise in his introduction to the 1975 edition of Cane:

Lola Ridge, editor of Broom, predicted that Toomer would be the most widely discussed author of his generation, which is remembered now for such individuals as Sherwood Anderson Ernest Hemingway F. Scott Fitzgerald and William Faulkner. John McClure, editor of Double Dealer, had favorably compared Toomer's lyricism with Sherwood Anderson.

Anderson was an older writer, whose powerful artistic sensibilities and willingness to help other writers made him something of a mentor to many of the writers of the nineteen twenties, including some of those mentioned above. In a different book entitled In A Minor Chord, Turner quoted a letter from Anderson to Toomer praising his work: "You are the only negro … who seems really to have consciously the artist's impulse."

As Anderson's comment indicates, the critical reception of Cane was not just about Toomer's achievement as a writer, but as a Negro writer, which, in the 1920s was rare but increasingly important. He is often associated with the Harlem Renaissance of the 1920s and 1930s, but Toomer was, at best, on the outskirts of the intellectual scene in Harlem. Arna Bontemps, one of the most influential writers to have come out of that movement, captured the social significance of Cane in his introduction to the 1969 edition of the book, published by Perennial Classics. "Only two small printings were issued, and these vanished quickly," Bontemps wrote. "However, among the most affected was practically an entire generation of young Negro writers then just beginning to emerge; their reaction to Toomer's Cane marked an awakening that soon thereafter began to be called a Negro Renaissance." He went on to list such luminaries as Countee Cullen Langston Hughes Zora Neale Hurston and Wallace Thurman as having been influenced by this book. Bontemps captures this critical response with the words of one writer, Charles S. Johnson, a distinguished scholar and sociologist. "Here was the Negro artist," he quotes Johnson saying, "detached from propaganda, sensitive only to beauty. Where [Paul Laurence] gave to the unnamed Negro peasant a reassuring touch of humanity, Toomer gave to the peasant a passionate charm … more than any artist, he was an experimentalist, and this last quality has carried him away from what was, perhaps, the most astonishingly brilliant beginning of any Negro writer of this generation."

Brian Joseph Benson and Mabel Mayle Dillard, in a 1980 book about Toomer's career, explain the novel's perseverance as resulting from the absolute dedication of its early readers. They wrote that "it is apparent that Cane became one of those classics kept alive by word of mouth and sheer admiration on the part of readership. This is a verifiable statement since, when it came time for those successful figures of the 1920s to write their memoirs, Cane is mentioned time after time as one book which stuck in the mind as an inspirational work."

Although the book was remembered by its fervent admirers, the rest of...