Blood-Burning Moon

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Of the writers represented in this gathering, Jean Toomer would seem to be among the most lyrically and imaginatively gifted. Yet, ironically, his fate was to write for decades in obscurity, leaving behind a voluminous quantity of unpublished work — short stories, novels, plays, an autobiography. His Cane (1923) is a work of literary genius, but never again, perhaps by his own design, did he attempt a work of its type or quality.

Jean Toomer was born in Washington, D.C., attended a number of colleges without earning a degree, and began writing in his middle twenties. From the first he aligned himself not with the then-dominant literary mode of Naturalism, but with Modernist experimentation; he published poems in avant-garde magazines like Broom and the Little Review, as well as in black publications. The dazzling Cane, though written within a few years of Anderson's Winesburg, Ohio, would seem to have sprung from entirely different sources, as from another planet.

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