Jean+Toomer

JEAN TOOMER

Jean Toomer was born in Washington, D.C. December 26, 1894. He was of mixed racial and ethnic decent. Toomer attended both, all white and all black segregated schools. He went off and on at the schools time and time again. Later on in Toomers life he attended six institutions of higher education between 1914 and 1917 (the University of Wisconsin, the Massachusetts College of Agriculture, the American College of Physical Training in Chicago, the University of Chicago, New York University, and the City College of New York) studying agriculture, fitness, biology, sociology, and history, but he never completed a degree.Everything he did in college lead him to the path of the writer he was later. He later died in March 30, 1967.

Jean Toomer was a writer during the Harlem renaisance, he published books on what is was like to live in it. He also published books on what it was, and all of the racism that took place in his life. He was highly respected and is still talked about today for his works from back then. Not everything he wrote was about the Harlem renaisance, he also wrote other stories that brought out his creative side, and showed his intelligence and style as an author.

Between 1918 and 1923 Toomer wrote the short stories "Bona and Paul" and "Withered Skin of Berries," the plays //Natalie Mann// (1922) and //Balo// (1922), and many poems such as "Five Vignettes," "Skyline," "Poem in C," "Gum," "Banking Coal," and "The First American."

In 1923, Toomer published the novel Cane. It is considered by scholars to be his best work. A series of poems and short stories about the black experience in America, //Cane// was seen as an important work of both the Harlem renaisance and the Lost generation.

A random list of quotes from this authors writing are as followed:

And there, a field rat, startled, squealing bleeds, His belly close to ground. I see the blade, Blood-stained, continue cutting weeds and shade

//Reapers// (1988) O singers, resinous and soft your songs Above the sacred whisper of the pines, Give virgin lips to cornfield concubines, Bring dreams of Christ to dusky cane-lipped throngs.

//Georgia Dusk// (1988) Superstition saw Something it had never seen before: Brown eyes that loved without a trace of fear, Beauty so sudden for that time of year.

//November Cotton Flower// , (1988) One seed becomes An everlasting song, a singing tree, Caroling softly souls of slavery, What they were, and what they are to me, Caroling softly souls of slavery.

//Song of the Son// (1986) . __________________________________________________________________________________________________________________

Nathan Eugene Toomer was born on December 26, 1894 in Washington DC. Nina Pinchback and Nathan Toomer were the parents of Jean Toomer. The presence of his father in Jean’s life was to be short-lived, however; when Jean was just ten months old his father and mother separated, and the elder Toomer never assumed an active role in his son’s life. His mother resumed the usage of her maiden name, and her son also used Pinchback throughout his childhood. Once he reached adulthood he began using the surname Toomer, and became Jean when he began to write. Toomer spent the first dozen years of his life living in white neighborhoods, in both Washington DC as well as in New York, when his mother’s remarriage to a white man relocated the family.Because he claimed residency in both white and black neighborhoods, Toomer was afforded a view of race that most people, white and black, were not privy to. In fact, later in his life he grew fond of saying that he had an advantage over most other people in knowing the truth about race because of this dual residency. While spending time in rural Georgia, Toomer gained a new appreciation for folk culture, having opportunities to observe people singing spirituals, an "antidote" to lives that poverty and oppression would otherwise make life hard to deal with. It was in this spiritual response that Toomer was able to write the first narratives of the work that some say marked the dawning of a new era in black literature—1923’s Cane. For Toomer, the work marked a departure,in his introduction to Toomer’s The Wayward and the Seeking, Darwin T. Turner observes that he grew more concerned with spiritual reform, and less about his identity as a writer. Toomer objected to his heralding as a black writer who wrote about black issues; cutting the ties with the literary circles in which he previously traveled, he became a student and later a teacher of the doctrine of George Ivanovitch Gurdjieff. In 1932 he married Margery Latimer, who sadly died less than a year later during childbirth. Two years later he married again, this time to Marjorie Content. He continued to write throughout the rest of his life, and although his body of work is large—four novels, four autobiographies, two collections of poems, and three full-length dramas make up but a part of it—none of his subsequent works ever reached the pinnacle of success of Cane. Plagued by health problems, Jean Toomer died in a nursing home in Pennsylvania on March 30, 1967.