Jean Toomer

Originally published in 1923, Jean Toomer's Cane remains an innovative literary work—part drama, part poetry, part fiction. This revised Norton Critical Edition builds upon the First Edition (1988), which was edited by the late Darwin T. Turner, a pioneering scholar in the field of African American studies. The Second Edition begins with the editors' introduction, a major work of scholarship...

First published in 1923, Jean Toomer's Cane is an innovative literary work—part drama, part poetry, part fiction—powerfully evoking black life in the South. Rich in imagery, Toomer's impressionistic, sometimes surrealistic sketches of Southern rural and urban life are permeated by visions of smoke, sugarcane, dusk, and fire. The northern world is pictured as a harsher reality of asphalt streets. This...

This Norton Critical Edition includes: The text of Toomer's genre-bending masterpiece as edited by Darwin T. Turner for the First Norton Critical Edition (1988). A revised and expanded introduction, featuring new archival discoveries, and annotations by Henry Louis Gates, Jr., and Jesse McCarthy. Thirteen illustrations related to Toomer's life, which are new to the Third Edition, and the map of...