Cane

Published in 1923, Jean Toomer's Cane was widely heralded as one of the first masterpieces of the Harlem Renaissance, and its author as "a bright morning star" of the movement. Toomer himself, however, was reluctant to embrace an explicitly racialized identity, preferring to define himself as simply an American writer.

Inspired in part by Sherwood Anderson's short story cycle Winesburg, Ohio, Toomer conceived Cane as a mosaic of intricately connected vignettes, poems, stories, songs, and eve...