Jean Toomer
Writer for a New America
Format:Hardback
Publisher:Yale University Press
Publishing:10th Nov '26
£25.00
This title is due to be published on 10th November, and will be despatched as soon as possible.
A critical biography of Harlem Renaissance writer Jean Toomer and his lifelong struggle to transcend race, by an award-winning author
The poet and novelist Jean Toomer (1894–1967) was among the most influential figures of the Harlem Renaissance, inspiring generations of Black writers with his 1923 modernist masterwork Cane. Yet his mission was to awaken Americans to the formation of a new “American” race that would supersede the “old” racial categories. Award-winning biographer George Hutchinson reveals how Toomer’s racial theory shaped both his literary genius and his personal struggles.
Born into the Black elite in Washington, D.C., Toomer was highly sensitive to the color line and able to move across it. Toomer engaged in a lifelong struggle to be released from this system, reinventing himself racially, spiritually, and artistically not as a Black man but as a “superman.” From his early attraction to physical culture through his search for Cosmic Consciousness, Toomer aspired to shape a new modern sensibility alongside his bohemian contemporaries Georgia O’Keeffe, Alfred Stieglitz, Langston Hughes, and Nella Larsen. Yet his refusal to identify as Black, in tandem with his messianic calling, came at the cost of his literary career and the women who loved him.
Hutchinson shows how the tortures of American racism shaped Toomer’s life—and how the struggle to birth a new “American” identity marks his art.
“Toomer’s refusal of racial and artistic categories confounded even ardent supporters. Illuminating Toomer’s struggles against all restraints, Hutchinson’s deeply researched, insightful biography revitalizes a brilliant but misread writer: a spectacular achievement.”—Carla Kaplan, author of Troublemaker: The Fierce, Unruly Life of Jessica Mitford
“In Toomer, Hutchinson meets a life he is exceptionally well equipped to decipher. There is no better biography of Cane’s searching author, and no better account of that classic’s liminal genesis.”—William J. Maxwell, Washington University in St. Louis
“A rich and compelling account of Jean Toomer’s unorthodox American life. It will be the authoritative biography of this major figure of the Harlem Renaissance/US modernism for years to come.”—Mark Whalan, University of Oregon
“With a vivid sense of inwardness, George Hutchinson tells the fascinating story of Jean Toomer’s lifelong quest, in his writings and associations, for a cosmopolitan world beyond racial labels.”—Werner Sollors, author of Neither Black nor White yet Both
“No one appreciates the intricacies of the color line with more poetic imagining and surgical, academic precision like Hutchinson. Whether he is approaching the issue through the lens of ideas or institutions, or through the vehicle of an individual life, like that of Jean Toomer, Hutchinson has been a witness for the bounty of stories that are contained in the interstices of identity for the entirety of his brilliant career.”—Emily Bernard
ISBN: 9780300267730
Dimensions: unknown
Weight: unknown
344 pages