Jean ToomerEdition 1

“This book is what scholars of American and African American literature have needed for quite some time. Robert B. Jones’s selection of materials is excellent, and his expert ordering reveals that breadth and evolution of Jean Toomer’s thought over several decades. This collection will considerably enlarge our understanding of the author whose reputation remains tied, in large part, to Cane.”—Rudolph P. Byrd, Emory University

“Like the intertextual relations between ‘black-authored’ and ‘white-authored’ literary works, the relationships between Black and White intellectuals in New York in the 1910s and 1920s, both personally and intellectually, were far more fluid and complex—and productive—than American scholarship has acknowledged. The essays collected here enhance such acknowledgment considerably, with implications for the transformation of our understanding of American modernism as well as the interracial cultural history o the United States. Certainly, such was Robert Jones’s large and generous aim in creating this important book.”—from the Foreword by Georg Hutchinson