Toomer's modernist masterpiece mixes poems, prose sketches, and a closing drama into a portrait of Black life in two Americas: the cane fields and small towns of rural Georgia, and the streets and cabarets of Washington, D.C., and Chicago. Drawn from Toomer's months teaching in Sparta, Georgia, it moves by image and music rather than plot, and its 1923 publication — with a foreword by Waldo Frank — made it a cornerstone of the Harlem Renaissance.
Author: Jean Toomer · Original publisher: Boni & Liveright (New York), 1923