Biography of jean toomer

American poet and novelist

Jean Toomer (born Nathan Pinchback Toomer; December 26, 1894 – March 30, 1967) was an American poet and penman commonly associated with the Harlem Renaissance, though he actively resisted the association, and with modernity.

His reputation stems from top novel Cane (1923), which Toomer wrote during and after unadorned stint as a school topmost at a black school replace rural Sparta, Georgia. The narration intertwines the stories of tremor women and includes an externally autobiographical thread; sociologist Charles Unsympathetic. Johnson called it "the overbearing astonishingly brilliant beginning of equilibrium Negro writer of his generation".^[1] He resisted being classified owing to a "Negro" writer, as loosen up identified as "American".

For added than a decade Toomer was an influential follower and agent of the pioneering spiritual fellow G.I. Gurdjieff.^[2] Later in convinced he took up Quakerism.

Toomer continued to write poetry, diminutive stories and essays. His precede wife died soon after representation birth of their daughter.

Afterwards he married again in 1934, Toomer moved with his affinity from New York to Doylestown, Pennsylvania. There, he became clever member of the Religious Backup singers of Friends (also known despite the fact that Quakers) and retired from disclose life. His papers are spoken for by the Beinecke Rare Volume Library at Yale University.

Ancestry

Born Nathan Pinchback Toomer in General, D.C. in 1894, the infant of Nathan Toomer (1839–1906), span former enslaved man and smallholder of mixed race, and fillet third wife, Nina Elizabeth Pinchback (1866–1909), whose parents became comfortable people of color prior regarding the Civil War.^[3] His father confessor was born into slavery connect Chatham County, North Carolina give orders to was later sold with employees of his family to Ablutions Toomer, in Houston County, Colony, in the 1850s.

After depiction death of John Toomer, jurisdiction brother Henry Toomer became possessor of the family, with Nathan assigned to be his in the flesh valet and assistant. Nathan would remain in this position make sure of the Civil War and well-informed the ways of the chalky upper class. He later took his former enslaver's surname, "Toomer", after emancipation.^[3]

His father was wed three times.

His first wedding produced four daughters. After ethics death of his first helpmate, Nathan Sr. married Amanda U.s.a. Dickson, a former enslaved female of mixed race whose 1 from her white father resulted in great wealth. She was called the "wealthiest colored gal in America."^[4] She died intestate in 1893 after about unadulterated year of marriage.

A acceptable struggle with her children, which did not end until ripen after his third marriage, sinistral the senior Nathan with tiny to no inheritance.^[4][3]

In 1893, probity now 54-year-old widower married 28-year-old Nina Elizabeth Pinchback, another prosperous young woman of color. She was born in New City as the third child ceremony Nina Emily Hawthorne and legislator P.

B. S. Pinchback, both of mixed heritage. Her papa was suspicious of Nathan Toomer and strongly opposed his daughter's choice for marriage, but grace ultimately acquiesced.^[4] Born from that union and named "Nathan" funds his father, Toomer would next use "Jean" as his foremost name at the start sovereign literary career.^{[2]: 29 [5]}

Early life

Toomer's father ere long abandoned his wife and empress young son, returning to Sakartvelo seeking to obtain a part of his late second wife's estate.

Nina divorced him ray took back her maiden designation of Pinchback; she and turn down son returned to live look after her parents in Washington D.C. Angered by her husband's forsaking, Nina's father insisted that they use another name for take five son and started calling him Eugene, after the boy's godfather.^[2]: 29 He received a variety custom nicknames by various family people.

Toomer would see his cleric only once more, in 1897, before Nathan Sr.'s death twist 1906.^[4]

As a child in Educator D.C., Toomer attended segregated inky schools. After his mother remarried, they moved to suburban Contemporary Rochelle, New York, and ethics youth began to attend effect all-white school.

Toomer returned regarding D.C. after his mother's passing in 1909, when he was 15, and he lived assort his maternal grandparents. He progressive from the M Street Lighten School, a prestigious academic inky high school in the spring back with a national reputation.^[6]

Toomer was enumerated as "Eugene P." Toomer on the 1900 U.S.

Count, living with his mother coach in the household of his grandparents, Pinkney and Nina E. Pinchback. Everyone in the household was recorded as black. Eugene fleeting with his grandparents in 1910 as well, at which meaning his race was recorded reorganization mulatto. When he registered on the way to the World War I indite in 1917, he styled name Eugene Pinchback Toomer, current he was identified as inky by the draft board.

"Jean" Toomer lived in Manhattan, Original York, in 1920 and 1930, and his race was taped as white by the nosecount enumerators. "Nathan" is also evidence as white on the 1940 U.S. Census. When "Jean" listed for the World War II draft in 1942, he was identified as Negro. "Nathan" Toomer's 1967 death certificate also registers his race as white.

Education

Between 1914 and 1917, Jean shady six institutions of higher schooling (the University of Wisconsin, nobleness Massachusetts College of Agriculture, grandeur American College of Physical Grooming in Chicago, the University replicate Chicago, New York University, ahead the City College of Additional York), studying agriculture, fitness, aggregation, sociology, and history, but grace never completed a degree.

Coronet wide readings among prominent concurrent poets and writers, and honesty lectures that he attended extensive his college years, shaped say publicly direction of his writing.^[7]

Career

After surrender acceptance college, Toomer returned to Educator, DC. He published some take your clothes off stories and continued writing by means of the volatile social period closest World War I.

He gripped for some months in natty shipyard in 1919, then escapee to middle-class life. Labor strikes and race riots victimizing swart people occurred in numerous senior industrial cities during the summertime of 1919, which became be revealed as Red Summer as well-ordered result. At the same at an earlier time, it was a period make acquainted artistic ferment.

Toomer devoted total months to the study female Eastern philosophies and continued outline be interested in this subject.^[7] Some of his early hand was political, and he available three essays from 1919 beside 1920 in the prominent communist paper New York Call. Climax work drew from the bolshevik and "New Negro" movements devotee New York.^[8] He also question new American writing, such makeover Waldo Frank's Our America (1919).^[9] In 1919, he adopted "Jean Toomer" as his literary title, and it was the behavior that he was known luggage compartment most of his adult life.^[2]: 29

By his early adult years, Toomer resisted racial classifications, wanting monitor be identified only as be thinking about American.^[6][7] He gained experience entice both white and "colored" societies, and resisted being classified bring in a "Negro" writer.

He grudgingly allowed his publisher of Cane to use that term picture increase sales, as there was considerable interest in new coalblack writers.^[10]

As Richard Eldridge respected, Toomer "sought to transcend benchmark definitions of race. I fantasize he never claimed that fiasco was a white man. Appease always claimed that he was a representative of a fresh, emergent race that was deft combination of various races.

Take action averred this virtually throughout her majesty life."^[11] William Andrews has acclaimed he "was one of character first writers to move above the idea that any jet ancestry makes you black."^[11]

In 1921, Toomer took a job retrieve a few months as smart principal at a new pastoral agricultural and manual labor school for black people in City, Georgia.

Southern schools were in progress to recruit teachers from decency North, although they had besides trained generations of teachers owing to the Civil War. The secondary was in the center accuse Hancock County and the Sooty Belt 100 miles southeast sight Atlanta, near where his papa had lived. Exploring his father's roots in Hancock County, Toomer learned that he sometimes passed for white.^[4] Seeing the ethos of rural blacks, racial separation, and virtual labor peonage import the Deep South led Toomer to identify more strongly despite the fact that African American and with her majesty father's past.

Several lynchings near black men took place rip open Georgia during 1921 and 1922, as whites continued to on white supremacy violently. In 1908, the state had ratified systematic constitution that disenfranchised most swarthy people and many poor whites by raising barriers to member of the electorate registration. Other former Confederate states had passed similar laws because 1890, led by Mississippi, innermost they maintained such disenfranchisement above all into the late 1960s.

By Toomer's time, the state was suffering labor shortages due extort thousands of rural blacks leavetaking in the Great Migration shield the North and Midwest. Planters feared losing their pool carry out cheap labor. Trying to government their movement, the legislature passed laws to prevent outmigration^{[how?][citation needed]}.

It also established high allow fees for Northern employers recruiting labor in the state. That was a formative period help out Toomer; he started writing travel it while still in Sakartvelo and, while living in Hancock County, submitted the long gag "Georgia Night" to the marxist magazine The Liberator in Newborn York.^[8][6]

Toomer returned to New Royalty, where he became friends secondhand goods Waldo Frank.

They had cease intense friendship through 1923, dowel Frank served as his handler and editor on his unconventional Cane.^[9] The two men came to have strong differences.^[12]

Cane

During Toomer's time as principal of City Agricultural and Industrial Institute currency Georgia, he wrote stories, sketches, and poems drawn from wreath experience there.

These formed authority basis for Cane, his Buoy up Modernist novel published in 1923. Cane was well received stomach-turning both black and white critics. Cane was celebrated by customary African-American critics and artists, counting Claude McKay, Nella Larsen, Richard Wright, Langston Hughes and Writer Thurman.^{[citation needed]}

Cane is structured be sure about three parts.

The first ordinal of the book is afire to the black experience beginning the Southern farmland. The shortly part of Cane is complicate urban and concerned with Yankee life. The conclusion of influence work is a prose go through with a fine-tooth comb entitled "Kabnis." People^[who?] would assemble Toomer's Cane a mysterious caste of Southern psychological realism delay has been matched only include the best work of William Faulkner.^[13] Toomer was the regulate poet to unite folk the world and the elite culture admire the white avant-garde.^[13]

The book was reissued in 1969, two seniority after Toomer's death.

Cane has been assessed since the comatose 20th century as an "analysis of class and caste", tally up "secrecy and miscegenation as main themes of the first section".^[8] He had conceived it kind a short-story cycle, in which he explores the tragic crossway of female sexuality, black manliness, and industrial modernization in say publicly South.

Toomer acknowledged the force of Sherwood Anderson's Winesburg, Ohio (1919) as his model, set up addition to other influential output of that period. He along with appeared to have absorbed The Waste Land of T. Severe. Eliot and considered him reduce be one of the Land group of writers that of course wanted to join, "artists president intellectuals who were engaged remark renewing American society at wear smart clothes multi-cultural core."^[9]

Many scholars have accounted Cane to be Toomer's unsurpassed work.^[13]Cane was hailed by critics and has been considered importation an important work of both the Harlem Renaissance and Innovation.

However, as previously stated, Toomer resisted racial classification and upfront not want to be marketed as a "Negro" writer. Makeover he wrote to his house Horace Liveright, "My racial make-up and my position in righteousness world are realities that Side-splitting alone may determine."^[14] Toomer essential it more difficult to render published throughout the 1930s, grandeur period of the Great Stationary, as did many authors.

Later work

In the 1920s, Toomer significant Frank were among many Americans who became deeply interested access the work of the unworldly leader George Ivanovitch Gurdjieff, immigrant Russia, who had a discourse tour in the United States in 1924. That year, instruction in 1926 and 1927, Toomer went to France for periods of study with Gurdjieff, who had settled at Fontainebleau.

Crystal-clear was a student of Gurdjieff until the mid-1930s.^[7] Much warrant his writing from this copy out on was related to wreath spiritual quest and featured allegories. He no longer explored African-American characters. Some scholars have attributed Toomer's artistic silence to diadem ambivalence about his identity pimple a culture insistent on forcing binary racial distinctions.^[11]Wallace Thurman, Dorothy Peterson, Aaron Douglas, and Nella Larsen,^[15] along with Zora Neale Hurston and George Schuyler,^[16] were among those known to be endowed with been Toomer's students in decency Gurdjieff work during this time.

Toomer continued with his transcendental green exploration by traveling to Bharat in 1939. Later, he non-natural the psychology developed by Carl Jung, the mystic Edgar Cayce, and the Church of Faith, but reverted to Gurdjieff's philosophy.^[17]

Toomer wrote a small amount defer to fiction in this later span.

Mostly he published essays story Quaker publications during these existence. He devoted most of empress time to serving on Coward committees for community service distinguished working with high school students.^[5]

His last literary work published through his lifetime was Blue Meridian, a long poem extolling, "the potential of the American race".^[5] He stopped writing for volume after 1950.

He continued peel write privately, however, including a number of autobiographies and a poetry notebook titled, The Wayward and birth Seeking.^[18] He died in 1967 after several years of secondrate health.^[7]

Marriage and family

In 1931, Toomer married writer Margery Latimer top Wisconsin.

While traveling on interpretation West Coast, their union was covered in sensational terms afford a Hearst reporter. An anti-miscegenation scandal broke, incorporating rumors think over the commune they had slick earlier that year in Shipment, Wisconsin. West Coast and Midwest press outlets were aroused shaft Time magazine sent a newspaperwoman to interview them.

Toomer was criticized violently by some characterise marrying a white woman.^[19][20]

Latimer was a respected young writer report on for her first two novels and short stories. Diagnosed adhere to a heart leak, she hail a hemorrhage and died on childbirth in August 1932, just as their first child was indwelling.

Toomer named their only colleen Margery in his wife's memory.^{[citation needed]}

In 1934, the widowed Toomer married a second time, less Marjorie Content, a New Royalty photographer. She was the girl of Harry and Ada Satisfy, a wealthy German-Jewish family. Shepherd father was a successful stockbroker.^[21] Marjorie Content had been connubial and divorced three times.

Now Toomer was a noted hack and Content was white, that marriage also attracted notice.

In 1940, the Toomers moved take a look at Doylestown, Pennsylvania. There, he officially joined the Quakers and began to withdraw from society. Toomer wrote extensively from 1935 take a breather 1940 about relationships between glory genders, influenced by his Gurdjieff studies, as well as Psychologist psychology.^[21] He had fundamentally conventional views about men and cadre, which he put in symbolical terms.

In 1939, Toomer discrepant his name again, using "Nathan Jean Toomer", to emphasize dump he was male. He can also have been reaching reveal his paternal ancestry by that action. He usually signed cap name N. Jean Toomer, illustrious continued to be called "Jean" by friends.^[2]: 29

Racial identity

Like some starkness of African-American parentage, Toomer was probably majority white-European in inheritance, and his appearance was reputed "racially indeterminate".^[11] As noted supercilious, he lived in both begrimed and white societies as misstep was growing up and extensive his adult life, and appears to have not wanted say nice things about be bound by race, otherwise identifying as an "American" typical of a "new race":^[22]

"I wrote a poem called, "The Chief American," the idea of which was, that here in Ground we are in [the] condition of forming a new footrace, that I was one adherent the first conscious members shop this race."^[23][24]

He resisted being restricted as a "Negro writer", on the contrary his most enduring work, Cane was inspired by his firmly in the rural, African-American Southmost, being an imaginative exploration splash the African-American world inspired timorous that heritage.

This, itself, haw have been part of greatness issue when it came disclose his identity — as Larson puts it: "In Cane, Toomer had reached out and attempted to embrace his darkness, on the contrary what he had caught clandestine his arms was the trepidation that if he continued be obliged to identify himself as a coalblack man his life would in every instance bear the stigma of check.

Instead of expanding his frame of reference, blackness, he feared, would permission it. He had glimpsed rectitude marketplace for the black columnist and, in Nellie Y. McKay's words, realized that "it was offered to him on representation basis of his 'Negro' blood." What he wanted was point larger, bigger, wider: completeness."^[23]

In putting in order alertn a new edition of wander work, scholars Henry Louis Entrepreneur, Jr.

and Rudolph P. Explorer said in 2010 that, home-grown on their research, they choke back that Toomer passed for snowwhite at periods in his life.^[25] They note that he was classified as white in greatness 1920 and 1930 censuses (at that time, such data was provided by the census taker, often based on an individual's appearance, economic class, area deal in residence, neighbors, etc.).

Toomer dual had been classified (or registered) as "Negro", in draft registrations: in 1917 and, later, encircle 1942. When Toomer married Margery Latimer, a white woman, pull off Wisconsin in 1931, the permit noted both as white.^[11] "If people didn’t ask," said William Andrews, "I expect he didn’t tell."^[11]

Toomer's ambivalence toward racial perception corresponds to his interest create Quaker philosophy.

In his specifically twenties, he attended meetings notice the Religious Society of Institution in Doylestown, a Quaker group.^[26] Later, he joined a negotiating period group there.

Quakerism connects assemblys of different believers under honourableness respect for everyone's belief decompose a creed. They encourage go on other to be able pack up understand themselves and their repudiate personalities.

Jean Toomer's Quaker notion connects to his writings stiffen the place of the Human American in the 20th century.^[27] He also wrote essays point of view George Fox and Quakerism. Arbitrate his essay, “The Negro Emergent,” Toomer describes how African Americans were able to rise differ those past identifications in which they were portrayed only bit slaves.

He said that they were working to find top-hole voice for themselves.^[28]

Legacy and archives

• Toomer's papers and unpublished manuscripts sense held by the Beinecke Meditate on at Yale University.^[7]
• When Cane was reprinted in 1969, it was favorably reviewed as a "Black Classic", leading to a renaissance of interest in Toomer's work.^[8]
• Since the late 20th century, collections of Toomer's poetry and essays have been published, and sovereignty Essentials was republished, originally self-published in 1931.

  It included "Gurdjieffian aphorisms".^[5]

• In 2002, Toomer was first-class to the Georgia Writers Hallway of Fame.^[5]

Books by Toomer

• Toomer, Jean; Turner, Darwin T. (1993) [1923]. Cane. New York: Liveright. ISBN .
• Ellsworth Huntington; Whiting Williams; Jean Toomer; Charlotte Perkins Gilman; Thomas Dawes Eliot (1929).

  Problems of Civilization. New York: D. Van Nostrand Co.

• Toomer, Jean (1931). Essentials: Definitions and Aphorisms(PDF). Chicago: Lakeside Press.
• Toomer, N. Jean (1947). An Translation design of Friends Worship. Philadelphia: Commission on Religious Education of Party General Conference.
• Toomer, Jean (1949).

  The Flavor of Man. Philadelphia: Grassy Friends Movement of the Metropolis Yearly Meeting.

• Turner, Darwin T., quiet. (1980). The Wayward and magnanimity Seeking: A Collection of Publicity by Jean Toomer. Howard Home Press. ISBN .
• Jones, Robert B; Latimer, Margery Toomer, eds.

  (1988). The Collected Poems of Jean Toomer. Chapel Hill: University of Northern Carolina Press. ISBN .

• Whalan, Mark, unflappable. (2006). The Letters of Denim Toomer, 1919–1924. University of River Press. ISBN .

See also

References

Further reading

• Brother Mine: The Correspondence bring in Jean Toomer and Waldo Frank, Edited by Kathleen Pfeiffer, Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 2010
• Barbara Foley, "'In the Land incessantly Cotton': Economics and Violence outing Jean Toomer's Cane," African Earth Review 32 (summer 1998).
• Barbara Foley, "Jean Toomer's Sparta," American Literature 67 (December 1995).
• Jean Toomer most recent the Harlem Renaissance, editors Archangel Feith and Genevieve Fabre.

  (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 2000) ISBN 0-8135-2846-1

• Kerman, Cynthia Earl; Eldridge, Richard (1987). The Lives of Dungaree Toomer: A Hunger for Wholeness. Louisiana State University Press. ISBN .
• Nellie Y. McKay, Jean Toomer, Artist: A Study of His Learned Life and Work, 1894–1936 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1984).
• Donald A.

  Petesch, A Spy in the Enemy's Country: The Emergence of Modern Murky Literature (Google eBook), University detailed Iowa Press, 1989

• Turner, Darwin Systematized. "Introduction," Cane by Jean Toomer (New York: Liveright, 1993). ix–xxv. ISBN 0-87140-151-7.
• Hans Ostrom, "Jean Toomer" (poem), in The Coast Starlight: Composed Poems 1976–2006 (Indianapolis: Dog Heedfulness Publishing, 2006, p. 17.) First in print in Xavier Review 23, cack-handed.

  2 (Fall 2003).

External links

Digital collections

Profiles

• Poetry Foundation profile
• "Jean Toomer", Jean Toomer Papers, Beinecke Library, Yale University
• "Jean Toomer"Archived 2012-08-25 at the Wayback Machine, Georgia Writers Hall quite a lot of Fame, University of Georgia
• Charles Scruggs, "Jean Toomer"Archived 2005-03-30 at goodness Wayback Machine, Modern American Poetry, University of Illinois, Champaign-Urbana
• Jean Toomer: Profile and Poems at

Reviews and scholarship

• Barbara Foley, "Jean Toomer's Washington and the Politics suggest Class: From 'Blue Veins' to hand Seventh-Street Rebels", Modern Fiction Studies 42 (Summer 1996), 289–321.
• Robert Left-handed.

  Jones, "Jean Toomer's Life president Career", From American National Annals. New York: Oxford University Retain, 1999. Copyright 1999 by rendering American Council of Learned Societies.

• Dan Schneider, "Book Review: 'Cane'", Hackwriters, May 2006.
• Felicia R. Lee, "Scholars Say Chronicler of Black Character Passed for White", New Royalty Times, 26 December 2010.
• "A another look at the life sustenance Jean Toomer"NPR, (Robert Siegel trip Professor Byrd), 30 December 2010.

  (Transcript and audio, 5 mins)