As an African-American writer active in New York in the 1920s, Jean Toomer has often been considered a figure of the Harlem Renaissance. Toomer, however, disavowed the connection believing that it placed his race before his work as a poet. Toomer was born in 1894 in Washington, D.C., to a family of former slaves with a mixed racial background. Nonetheless, Toomer's father had amassed a large amount of property and the family lived comfortably. After two previous wives had died, Toomer's father married his mother in 1893, though he abandoned the family when Toomer was a young child.
Toomer was educated in New York and graduated from a private high school for the city's African-American elite. He then studied at numerous post-secondary institutions but never finished a program. After leaving school for the final time in 1917, Toomer began to write seriously. He focused primarily on short fiction during this period. In 1923 Toomer completed his first book. Cane, a comparative rumination on the lives of African-Americans in the Northern and Southern United States, was a critical success. The work featured both poetry, sketches, and prose fiction, and has been considered a prominent example of the Modernist literary movement of the early 20th century. Writers such as Faulkner lavished the novel with praise.
Although Cane was an incredibly celebrated and successful work, Toomer later struggled to find publishers willing to release his work. His work grew increasingly influenced by his various religious inspirations, including Scientology, and Toomer himself later converted to Quakerism. He stopped writing and died in 1967, at the age of 72. Several collections, lectures, and series of letters were published posthumously. One such collection is The Collected Poems of Jean Toomer, released in 1988. Featuring 55 poems, many of them previously unpublished, The collection exhaustively covers all periods of Toomer's career. The work also sheds a great deal of light onto Toomer's spiritualism and includes a section exclusively dedicated to Toomer's spiritual poetry. The collection is prefaced by an introduction from biographer Robert B. Jones.
