Cane

A lyrical “groundbreaking work” of the Harlem Renaissance, praised by writers from Langston Hughes to Maya Angelou and Alice Walker (The Washington Post).

“It would be good to hear their songs . . . reapers of the sweet-stalked cane, cutters of the corn . . . even though their throats cracked, and the strangeness of their voices deafened me.” —“Harvest Song,” Jean Toomer

Published in 1923, Jean Toomer’s Cane has long been recognized as a pioneering work in African American literature. Employing a modernist, nontraditional structure of thematically linked prose vignettes, poems, and dialogue presented in evocative, often mournful lyrical tones, Toomer created a unique impressionistic mosaic of the inner lives of African Americans in the early twentieth century, encompassing the rural South and the urban North. Deeply felt and beautifully expressed, Toomer’s masterpiece continues to resonate almost a century after it was written.

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