The Lives of Jean Toomer PDF Download

Author: Cynthia Earl Kerman
Publisher: LSU Press
ISBN: 9780807115480
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 436

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Author: Jean Toomer
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : African Americans
Languages : en
Pages : 266

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The novel is structured as a series of vignettes revolving around the origins and experiences of African Americans in the United States.

Author: Robert B. Jones
Publisher: UNC Press Books
ISBN: 1469616416
Category : Poetry
Languages : en
Pages : 148

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Book Description
This volume is the only collected edition of poems by Jean Toomer, the enigmatic American writer, Gurdjieffian guru, and Quaker convert who is perhaps best known for his 1923 lyrical narrative Cane. The fifty-five poems here -- most of them previously unpublished -- chart a fascinating evolution of artistic consciousness. The book is divided into sections reflecting four distinct periods of creativity in Toomer's career. The Aesthetic period includes Imagist, Symbolist, and other experimental pieces, such as "Five Vignettes," while "Georgia Dusk" and the newly discovered poem "Tell Me" come from Toomer' s Ancestral Consciousness period in the early 1920s. "The Blue Meridian" and other Objective Consciousness poems reveal the influence of idealist philosopher Georges Gurdjieff. Among the works of this period the editor presents a group of local color poems picturing the landscape of the American Southwest, including "Imprint for Rio Grande." "It Is Everywhere," another newly discovered poem, celebrates America and democratic idealism. The Quaker religious philosophy of Toomer's final years is demonstrated in such Christian Existential works as "They Are Not Missed" and "To Gurdjieff Dying." Robert Jones's clear and comprehensive introduction examines the major poems in this volume and serves as a guide through the stages of Toomer's evolution as an artist and thinker. The Collected Poems of Jean Toomer will prove essential to Toomer's admirers as well as to scholars and students of modern poetry, Afro-American literature, and American studies.

Author: Nellie Y. McKay
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 288

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Jean Toomer, Artist: A Study of His Literary Life and Work, 1894-1936

Author: Charles Scruggs
Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press
ISBN: 9780812234510
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 326

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In Jean Toomer and the Terrors of American History, Charles Scruggs and Lee VanDemarr examine original sources to show how the cultural wars of the 1920s influenced the shaping of Toomer's writing and subsequent efforts to escape the racial definitions of American society.

Author: Charles Scruggs
Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press
ISBN: 151280665X
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 320

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Book Description
Jean Toomer's Cane was the first major text of the Harlem Renaissance and the first important modernist text by an African-American writer. It powerfully depicts the terror in the history of American race relations, a public world of lynchings, race riots, and Jim Crow, and a private world of internalized conflict over identity and race which mirrored struggles in the culture at large. Toomer's own life reflected that internal conflict, and he has been an ambiguous figure in literary history, an author who wrote a text that had a tremendous impact on African American authors but who eventually tried to distance himself from Cane and from his identification as a black writer. In Jean Toomer and the Terrors of American History, Charles Scruggs and Lee VanDemarr examine original sources—Toomer's rediscovered early writings on politics and race, his extensive correspondence with Waldo Frank, and unpublished portions of his autobiographies—to show how the cultural wars of the 1920s influenced the shaping of Toomer's book and his subsequent efforts to escape the racial definitions of American society. That those definitions remain crucial for American society even today is one reason Toomer's work continues to fascinate and to influence contemporary writers and readers.

Author: Jean Toomer
Publisher: University of Illinois Press
ISBN: 0252056124
Category : Literary Collections
Languages : en
Pages : 246

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The friendship of Jean Toomer and Waldo Frank was one of the most emotionally intense, racially complicated, and aesthetically significant relationships in the history of American literary modernism. Waldo Frank was an established white writer who advised and assisted the younger African American Jean Toomer as he pursued a literary career. They met in 1920, began corresponding regularly in 1922, and were estranged by the end of 1923, the same year that Toomer published his ambitiously modernist debut novel, Cane. While individual letters between Frank and Toomer have been published separately on occasion, they have always been presented out of context. This volume presents for the first time their entire correspondence in chronological order, comprising 121 letters ranging from 200 to 800 words each. Kathleen Pfeiffer annotates and introduces the letters, framing the correspondence and explaining the literary and historical allusions in the letters themselves. Reading like an epistolary novel, Brother Mine captures the sheer emotional force of the story that unfolds in these letters: two men discover an extraordinary friendship, and their intellectual and emotional intimacy takes shape before our eyes. This unprecedented collection preserves the raw honesty of their exchanges, together with the developing drama of their ambition, their disappointments, their assessment of their world, and ultimately, the betrayal that ended the friendship.

Author: Jean Toomer
Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA
ISBN: 0195083296
Category : African Americans
Languages : en
Pages : 318

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Book Description
Jean Toomer achieved instant recognition as a critic and thinker in 1923 with the publication of his novel Cane, a harsh, eloquent vision of black American hardship and suffering. But because of his reclusive, introspective nature, Toomer's fame waned in later years, and today his other contributions to American thought and literature are all but forgotten. Now, this collection of unpublished writings restores a crucial dimension to our understanding of this important African American author. Thematically arranging letters, sketches, poems, autobiography, short stories, a play, and a children's story, Frederik Rusch offers insight into Toomer's mind and spirituality, his feelings on racial identity in America, and his attitudes toward and ideas about Cane. Rusch highlights Toomer's reflections on America, its people, landscape, and politics, reveals his significance for the problems and issues of today, and helps us understand Toomer not only as writer, but also as social critic, prophet, mystic, and idealist. Exploring Toomer's attempts to find self-realization and transcend social and cultural definitions of race, this book offers a unique view of the United States through the life of one of its most significant and fascinating intellectuals.

Author: Jean Toomer
Publisher: Good Press
ISBN:
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 143

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Book Description
"Cane" by Jean Toomer. Published by Good Press. Good Press publishes a wide range of titles that encompasses every genre. From well-known classics & literary fiction and non-fiction to forgotten−or yet undiscovered gems−of world literature, we issue the books that need to be read. Each Good Press edition has been meticulously edited and formatted to boost readability for all e-readers and devices. Our goal is to produce eBooks that are user-friendly and accessible to everyone in a high-quality digital format.

Author: Jean Toomer
Publisher: Edwin Mellen Press
ISBN:
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 468

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Book Description
Shortly after the 1923 publication of his Cane, a collage of poems, short stories, and sketches that depict the life of black Americans in both the rural South and the urban North, Toomer became a follower of spiritual leader Georges Gurdjieff. His published writing centered on those teachings for the next 20 years, until he became a Quaker in 1940, and published articles in that vein until 1950. Here are 45 poems and stories that have not appeared in previous collections, arranged in chronological sections from 1922 to 1950. Griffin (U. of South Carolina) provides a brief biographical sketch, but neither index nor bibliography. Annotation (c)2003 Book News, Inc., Portland, OR (booknews.com).