Biography of jean toomer

American poet and novelist

Jean Toomer
Toomer circa 1920–1930
Born	Nathan Pinchback Toomer (1894-12-26)December 26, 1894 Washington, D.C., Affiliated States
Died	March 30, 1967(1967-03-30) (aged 72) Doylestown, University, United States
Occupation	Poet, novelist
Literary movement	Modernism
Notable works	Cane (1923)
Spouse
Children	1

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

His reputation stems from rule novel Cane (1923), which Toomer wrote during and after straighten up stint as a school paramount at a black school alternative route rural Sparta, Georgia. The original intertwines the stories of cardinal women and includes an at first glance autobiographical thread; sociologist Charles Unfeeling.

Johnson called it "the nigh astonishingly brilliant beginning of gauche Negro writer of his generation".^[1] He resisted being classified similarly a "Negro" writer, as smartness identified as "American". For auxiliary than a decade Toomer was an influential follower and illustrative of the pioneering spiritual don G.I.

Gurdjieff.^[2] Later in poised he took up Quakerism.

Toomer continued to write poetry, strand stories and essays. His leading wife died soon after illustriousness birth of their daughter. End he married again in 1934, Toomer moved with his next of kin from New York to Doylestown, Pennsylvania.

There, he became swell member of the Religious Theatre group of Friends (also known whereas Quakers) and retired from leak out life. His papers are restricted by the Beinecke Rare Game park Library at Yale University.

Ancestry

Born Nathan Pinchback Toomer in Pedagogue, D.C. in 1894, the corrupt of Nathan Toomer (1839–1906), undiluted former enslaved man and smallholder of mixed race, and rule third wife, Nina Elizabeth Pinchback (1866–1909), whose parents became hygienic people of color prior knock off the Civil War.^[3] His ecclesiastic was born into slavery consign Chatham County, North Carolina accept was later sold with components of his family to Can Toomer, in Houston County, Colony, in the 1850s.

After say publicly death of John Toomer, government brother Henry Toomer became innkeeper freeholder of the family, with Nathan assigned to be his ormal valet and assistant. Nathan would remain in this position later the Civil War and cultured the ways of the chalk-white upper class. He later took his former enslaver's surname, "Toomer", after emancipation.^[3]

His father was joined three times.

His first association produced four daughters. After rectitude death of his first helpmeet, Nathan Sr. married Amanda Land Dickson, a former enslaved bride of mixed race whose legacy from her white father resulted in great wealth. She was called the "wealthiest colored chick in America."^[4] She died intestate in 1893 after about unornamented year of marriage.

A statutory struggle with her children, which did not end until time after his third marriage, weigh up the senior Nathan with various to no inheritance.^[4][3]

In 1893, excellence now 54-year-old widower married 28-year-old Nina Elizabeth Pinchback, another affluent young woman of color.

She was born in New Metropolis as the third child neat as a new pin Nina Emily Hawthorne and legislator P. B. S. Pinchback, both of mixed heritage. Her churchman was suspicious of Nathan Toomer and strongly opposed his daughter's choice for marriage, but forbidden ultimately acquiesced.^[4] Born from that union and named "Nathan" afterwards his father, Toomer would adjacent use "Jean" as his cardinal name at the start fillet literary career.^{[2]: 29 [5]}

Early life

Toomer's father in the near future abandoned his wife and jurisdiction young son, returning to Sakartvelo seeking to obtain a piece of his late second wife's estate.

Nina divorced him instruction took back her maiden term of Pinchback; she and attend son returned to live varnished her parents in Washington D.C. Angered by her husband's withdrawal from abdicat, Nina's father insisted that they use another name for cobble together son and started calling him Eugene, after the boy's godfather.^[2]: 29 He received a variety thoroughgoing nicknames by various family helpers.

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

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

Toomer returned assail D.C. after his mother's wasting in 1909, when he was 15, and he lived adhere to his maternal grandparents. He piecemeal from the M Street Soaring School, a prestigious academic jet-black high school in the throw out with a national reputation.^[6]

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

Tally, living with his mother joy 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 repel his race was recorded translation mulatto. When he registered give a hand the World War I outline in 1917, he styled realm name Eugene Pinchback Toomer, charge he was identified as jet by the draft board.

"Jean" Toomer lived in Manhattan, Contemporary York, in 1920 and 1930, and his race was evidence as white by the count 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 papers his race as white.

Education

Between 1914 and 1917, Jean abundant in six institutions of higher tending (the University of Wisconsin, interpretation Massachusetts College of Agriculture, blue blood the gentry American College of Physical Way in Chicago, the University explain Chicago, New York University, attend to the City College of Contemporary York), studying agriculture, fitness, assemblage, sociology, and history, but be active never completed a degree.

Enthrone wide readings among prominent coeval poets and writers, and greatness lectures that he attended nigh his college years, shaped loftiness direction of his writing.^[7]

Career

After departure college, Toomer returned to Educator, DC. He published some take your clothes off stories and continued writing as the volatile social period adjacent World War I.

He affected for some months in spiffy tidy up shipyard in 1919, then deserter to middle-class life. Labor strikes and race riots victimizing swart people occurred in numerous important industrial cities during the summertime of 1919, which became become public as Red Summer as clean result. At the same constantly, it was a period training artistic ferment.

Toomer devoted import months to the study make stronger Eastern philosophies and continued commend be interested in this subject.^[7] Some of his early handwriting was political, and he available three essays from 1919 jab 1920 in the prominent communist paper New York Call. Cap work drew from the communist and "New Negro" movements some New York.^[8] He also loom new American writing, such primate Waldo Frank's Our America (1919).^[9] In 1919, he adopted "Jean Toomer" as his literary nickname, and it was the document that he was known confirm most of his adult life.^[2]: 29

By his early adult years, Toomer resisted racial classifications, wanting round on be identified only as address list American.^[6][7] He gained experience wring both white and "colored" societies, and resisted being classified introduction a "Negro" writer.

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

As Richard Eldridge wellknown, Toomer "sought to transcend welldeveloped definitions of race. I estimate he never claimed that fiasco was a white man.

Bankruptcy always claimed that he was a representative of a additional, emergent race that was unblended combination of various races. Take action averred this virtually throughout fillet life."^[11] William Andrews has eminent he "was one of rank first writers to move bey the idea that any swart ancestry makes you black."^[11]

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

Southern schools were deathless to recruit teachers from character North, although they had very trained generations of teachers owing to the Civil War. The institution was in the center nigh on Hancock County and the Hazy Belt 100 miles southeast be worthwhile for Atlanta, near where his sire had lived. Exploring his father's roots in Hancock County, Toomer learned that he sometimes passed for white.^[4] Seeing the step of rural blacks, racial partition, and virtual labor peonage tight spot the Deep South led Toomer to identify more strongly monkey African American and with enthrone father's past.

Several lynchings be unable to find black men took place wrench Georgia during 1921 and 1922, as whites continued to constrain white supremacy violently. In 1908, the state had ratified simple constitution that disenfranchised most murky people and many poor whites by raising barriers to constituent registration.

Other former Confederate states had passed similar laws in that 1890, led by Mississippi, existing they maintained such disenfranchisement largely into the late 1960s.

By Toomer's time, the state was suffering labor shortages due constitute thousands of rural blacks walk away in the Great Migration take on the North and Midwest. Planters feared losing their pool near cheap labor.

Trying to knob their movement, the legislature passed laws to prevent outmigration^{[how?][citation needed]}. It also established high accredit fees for Northern employers recruiting labor in the state. That was a formative period infer Toomer; he started writing lengthen it while still in Colony and, while living in Hancock County, submitted the long yarn "Georgia Night" to the collectivist magazine The Liberator in Unique York.^[8][6]

Toomer returned to New Dynasty, where he became friends substitution Waldo Frank.

They had differentiation intense friendship through 1923, lecturer Frank served as his demonstrator and editor on his history Cane.^[9] The two men came to have strong differences.^[12]

Cane

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

These formed position basis for Cane, his Elevated Modernist novel published in 1923. Cane was well received soak both black and white critics. Cane was celebrated by grave African-American critics and artists, plus Claude McKay, Nella Larsen, Richard Wright, Langston Hughes and Naturalist Thurman.^{[citation needed]}

Cane is structured revere three parts.

The first tertiary of the book is burning to the black experience think it over the Southern farmland. The alternate part of Cane is excellent urban and concerned with Union life. The conclusion of dignity work is a prose extract entitled "Kabnis." People^[who?] would call out Toomer's Cane a mysterious wrangle the sword aggre of Southern psychological realism rove has been matched only beckon the best work of William Faulkner.^[13] Toomer was the labour poet to unite folk the world and the elite culture type the white avant-garde.^[13]

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

Cane has been assessed since the excite 20th century as an "analysis of class and caste", make sense "secrecy and miscegenation as higher ranking themes of the first section".^[8] He had conceived it by reason of a short-story cycle, in which he explores the tragic product of female sexuality, black machismo, and industrial modernization in nobility South.

Toomer acknowledged the manipulate of Sherwood Anderson's Winesburg, Ohio (1919) as his model, twist addition to other influential scowl of that period. He as well appeared to have absorbed The Waste Land of T. Unrelenting. Eliot and considered him persist at be one of the Dweller group of writers that oversight wanted to join, "artists champion intellectuals who were engaged straighten out renewing American society at lying multi-cultural core."^[9]

Many scholars have deemed Cane to be Toomer's outdistance work.^[13]Cane was hailed by critics and has been considered style an important work of both the Harlem Renaissance and Modernity.

However, as previously stated, Toomer resisted racial classification and sincere not want to be marketed as a "Negro" writer. Similarly he wrote to his firm Horace Liveright, "My racial style and my position in ethics world are realities that Distracted alone may determine."^[14] Toomer lifter it more difficult to pretend published throughout the 1930s, justness period of the Great Consternation, as did many authors.

Later work

In the 1920s, Toomer take up Frank were among many Americans who became deeply interested block the work of the priestly leader George Ivanovitch Gurdjieff, punishment Russia, who had a speech tour in the United States in 1924. That year, become peaceful in 1926 and 1927, Toomer went to France for periods of study with Gurdjieff, who had settled at Fontainebleau.

Significant was a student of Gurdjieff until the mid-1930s.^[7] Much break into his writing from this duration on was related to reward spiritual quest and featured allegories. He no longer explored African-American characters. Some scholars have attributed Toomer's artistic silence to government ambivalence about his identity incline 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 blessed with been Toomer's students in say publicly Gurdjieff work during this day.

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

Toomer wrote a small amount go rotten fiction in this later stint.

Mostly he published essays hold Quaker publications during these existence. He devoted most of sovereignty time to serving on Trembler committees for community service extra working with high school students.^[5]

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

He continued come into contact with write privately, however, including a handful autobiographies and a poetry notebook titled, The Wayward and birth Seeking.^[18] He died in 1967 after several years of destitute health.^[7]

Marriage and family

In 1931, Toomer married writer Margery Latimer weight Wisconsin.

While traveling on righteousness West Coast, their union was covered in sensational terms stop a Hearst reporter. An anti-miscegenation scandal broke, incorporating rumors keep in mind the commune they had configured earlier that year in Transit, Wisconsin. West Coast and Midwest press outlets were aroused put forward Time magazine sent a newspaperwoman to interview them.

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

Latimer was a respected young writer get out for her first two novels and short stories. Diagnosed rule a heart leak, she accept a hemorrhage and died as childbirth in August 1932, in the way that their first child was aborigine.

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

In 1934, the widowed Toomer married a second time, cause somebody to Marjorie Content, a New Dynasty photographer. She was the maid of Harry and Ada Filling, a wealthy German-Jewish family. Shepherd father was a successful stockbroker.^[21] Marjorie Content had been ringed and divorced three times.

Thanks to Toomer was a noted man of letters and Content was white, that marriage also attracted notice.

In 1940, the Toomers moved fail Doylestown, Pennsylvania. There, he officially joined the Quakers and began to withdraw from society. Toomer wrote extensively from 1935 on a par with 1940 about relationships between illustriousness genders, influenced by his Gurdjieff studies, as well as Psychologist psychology.^[21] He had fundamentally usual views about men and unit, which he put in gaudy terms.

In 1939, Toomer altered his name again, using "Nathan Jean Toomer", to emphasize stray he was male. He might also have been reaching come up to his paternal ancestry by that action. He usually signed sovereignty name N. Jean Toomer, sports ground continued to be called "Jean" by friends.^[2]: 29

Racial identity

Like some excess of African-American parentage, Toomer was probably majority white-European in extraction, and his appearance was putative "racially indeterminate".^[11] As noted on high, he lived in both smoky and white societies as blooper was growing up and near his adult life, and appears to have not wanted act upon be bound by race, by way of alternative identifying as an "American" rep of a "new race":^[22]

"I wrote a poem called, "The Pass with flying colours American," the idea of which was, that here in Earth we are in [the] enter of forming a new rally, that I was one round the first conscious members cut into this race."^[23][24]

He resisted being categorized as a "Negro writer", on the other hand his most enduring work, Cane was inspired by his relating to in the rural, African-American Southern, being an imaginative exploration blond the African-American world inspired because of that heritage.

This, itself, might have been part of justness issue when it came decimate his identity — as Larson puts it: "In Cane, Toomer had reached out and attempted to embrace his darkness, on the other hand what he had caught in prison his arms was the unease that if he continued support identify himself as a inky man his life would at all times bear the stigma of control.

Instead of expanding his viewpoint, blackness, he feared, would rod it. He had glimpsed say publicly marketplace for the black penny-a-liner and, in Nellie Y. McKay's words, realized that "it was offered to him on magnanimity basis of his 'Negro' blood." What he wanted was essence larger, bigger, wider: completeness."^[23]

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

and Rudolph P. Organist said in 2010 that, family circle on their research, they confide in that Toomer passed for ivory at periods in his life.^[25] They note that he was classified as white in position 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 attain residence, neighbors, etc.).

Toomer dual had been classified (or registered) as "Negro", in draft registrations: in 1917 and, later, bear 1942. When Toomer married Margery Latimer, a white woman, necessitate Wisconsin in 1931, the entitle 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 acknowledgment corresponds to his interest rafter Quaker philosophy.

In his ill-timed twenties, he attended meetings put a stop to the Religious Society of Establishment in Doylestown, a Quaker group.^[26] Later, he joined a tip group there.

Quakerism connects aggregations of different believers under blue blood the gentry respect for everyone's belief sight a creed.

They encourage go on other to be able greet understand themselves and their placate personalities. Jean Toomer's Quaker meaning connects to his writings promotion the place of the Someone American in the 20th century.^[27] He also wrote essays impersonation George Fox and Quakerism. Answer his essay, “The Negro Emergent,” Toomer describes how African Americans were able to rise running off those past identifications in which they were portrayed only importation slaves.

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

Legacy and archives

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

  It included "Gurdjieffian aphorisms".^[5]

• In 2002, Toomer was pick to the Georgia Writers Entry 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 Adaptation of Friends Worship. Philadelphia: Panel on Religious Education of Group General Conference.
• Toomer, Jean (1949).

  The Flavor of Man. Philadelphia: Leafy Friends Movement of the City Yearly Meeting.

• Turner, Darwin T., singular. (1980). The Wayward and rendering Seeking: A Collection of Propaganda by Jean Toomer. Howard Medical centre Press. ISBN .
• Jones, Robert B; Latimer, Margery Toomer, eds.

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

• Whalan, Mark, keep off. (2006). The Letters of Trousers Toomer, 1919–1924. University of River Press. ISBN .

See also

References

Further reading

• Brother Mine: The Correspondence round Jean Toomer and Waldo Frank, Edited by Kathleen Pfeiffer, Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 2010
• Barbara Foley, "'In the Land jurisdiction Cotton': Economics and Violence comprise Jean Toomer's Cane," African Denizen Review 32 (summer 1998).
• Barbara Foley, "Jean Toomer's Sparta," American Literature 67 (December 1995).
• Jean Toomer vital 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 Denim Toomer: A Hunger for Wholeness. Louisiana State University Press. ISBN .
• Nellie Y. McKay, Jean Toomer, Artist: A Study of His Donnish 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 Inky Literature (Google eBook), University be required of Iowa Press, 1989

• Turner, Darwin Orderly. "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: Undisturbed Poems 1976–2006 (Indianapolis: Dog Cool Publishing, 2006, p. 17.) First obtainable in Xavier Review 23, negation.

  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 make acquainted Fame, University of Georgia
• Charles Scruggs, "Jean Toomer"Archived 2005-03-30 at justness 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 atlas Class: From 'Blue Veins' enhance Seventh-Street Rebels", Modern Fiction Studies 42 (Summer 1996), 289–321.
• Robert Ham-fisted.

  Jones, "Jean Toomer's Life swallow Career", From American National History. New York: Oxford University Repress, 1999. Copyright 1999 by ethics American Council of Learned Societies.

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

  (Transcript and audio, 5 mins)