Jean Toomer: Writer for a New America

Summary

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.