Jean Toomer

Jean Toomer (born Nathan Pinchback Toomer, born December 26, 1894 in Washington, DC, † March 30, 1967 in Doylestown, Bucks County, Pennsylvania) was an American writer who through his novel Cane to an outstanding member of Harlem Renaissance, a direction within the African-American literature in American literature, was.

Life

Toomer was a maternal grandson of PBS Pinchback, who was governor of Louisiana in 1872, and thus also the first African American governor of a U.S. state.

After school he studied at the University of Wisconsin, at the City College of New York and the University of Chicago. Later, he took courses in meditation at the Gurdjieff Institute in France.

His literary debut came in 1923 with the novel Cane and thus became one of the leaders of the Harlem Renaissance in African-American literature. In Cane is a united through and through modernist and experimental, though sometimes informally appearing work that prose, poetry and drama.

After Essentials (1931 ), a collection of aphorisms, appeared during his lifetime nor Portage potential ( 1932). Only posthumously published the anthologies The Wayward and the Seeking (1980) and The Collected Poems of Jean Toomer (1988).

In addition to his two marriages, among other things, a descendant of the Puritan theologian John Cotton, Toomer also had love affairs with Margaret Naumberg Frank, the wife of the writer Waldo Frank, and with the painter Georgia O'Keeffe.

Works (selection)

  • Kathleen Pfeiffer (ed.): Brother mine. The correspondence of Jean Toomer and Waldo Frank. University Press, Urbana, Ill. 2010, ISBN 978-0-252-03540-1.
  • Mark Whalan (ed.): The Letters of Jean Toomer, 1919-1924. University of Tennessee Press, Knoxville 2006, ISBN 1-57233-470-3.
  • Sugar cane ( " Cane", 1923). Ullsteinhaus, Frankfurt / M. 1985, ISBN 3-548-30176-2 ( The Woman in the literature ).
  • John C. Griffin ( Ed.): The uncollected works of Jean Toomer. From 1894 to 1967. Mellen, Lewiston 2003, ISBN 0-7734-6810-2.
  • Robert B. Jones (ed.): The collected poems of Jean Toomer. University Press, Chapel Hell, N.C. 1988, ISBN 0-8078-1773-2.
  • Frederic L. Rusch (ed.): A Jean Toomer Reader. University Press, New York 1993, ISBN 0-19-507733-4.
  • Darwin T. Turner ( Eds.): The wayward and the seeking. A ciollection of writings by Jean Toomer. University Press, Washington, 1980, ISBN 0-88258-014-0.
Doylestown, Pennsylvania P. B. S. Pinchback List of Governors of Louisiana University of Wisconsin System Experimental literature Anthology John Cotton (minister) Nellie Y. McKay Nella Larsen Claude McKay Countee Cullen Integrated Authority File
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