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Saturday October 11th 2008 |
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Saturday October 11th 2008 |
a non-profit education organization | |
December 26
Born in Washington, D. C., Toomer wanted a bonded argument that would resolve the conflicts of his bi-racial identity. Born Nathan Pinchback Toomer, his father deserted his mother when he was a year old and his mother died in 1909. He was raised in the home of his grandparents. As a writer, Greenwich Village progressive aesthetes nurtured Toomer in the 1910s and 1920s. His book, Cane was inspired by his two-month stint as a substitute principal at the Black Sparta Agricultural and Industrial Institute in Georgia in 1921. Entranced by Georgia's rural geography and its Black folk traditions, he saw in Southern life the harmony that escaped him, although he believed the culture to be disappearing through migration to the North and its encounter with modernity. Cane is a series of vignettes whose narrative structure moves from the South to the North and back to the South, forming a troubled synthesis of the two regions. Members of the Harlem Renaissance and the Black Arts Movement, as well as later African-American women writers have cited its influence and acclaimed the author's sensitive treatment of black folk life, his formal elegance, and his progressive, uninhibited approach to sexuality and gender. Cane was Toomer's only work that explicitly treated the lives of African-Americans; after its publication he disappeared from literary circles. In 1924 the restless author made the first of several pilgrimages to Fontainebleau, France, to study at the Institute for the Harmonious Development of Man. He taught philosophy in Harlem and Chicago until the mid-1930s. Toomer wrote voluminously until his death, and although much of his writing received occasional praise for its experimentation, African-Americans largely dismissed it. In 1930 Toomer declined to be included in James Weldon Johnson's Book of American Negro Poetry, on the grounds that he wasn't a Negro. Toomer continued to strive for a sense of wholeness, however, and for a definition of what Henry Louis Gates Jr. has described as a "remarkably fluid notion of race.” He found this potential of an "American" race, described in the 1936 long poem Blue Meridian, the last work published while he was alive. Reference: The Poetry of Black America Anthology of the 20th Century. Edited by Arnold Adoff, introduction by Gwendolyn Bennett Copyright 1973, Harper Collins Publishers ISBN 0-06-020089-8 to be a Writer
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The African American Registry®, The African American Registry® Copyright 2005, 2006
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