Jean Toomer (1894-1967)

January 29, 2007 
/ Contributed By: Martin Summers

|

Jean Toomer

Fair use image

Jean Toomer was born into an elite black family in Washington, D.C. in 1894. Abandoned by his father as a newborn and losing his mother to appendicitis as a teenager, Toomer spent his formative years in the home of his grandparents, P.B.S. and Nina Pinchback. P.B.S. Pinchback served as a state senator and governor of Louisiana during Reconstruction and nearly represented Louisiana in the United States Senate. After Redemption, Pinchback moved his family to Washington, D.C. where he opened a law firm.

After graduating from Dunbar High School, Toomer enrolled in the agriculture program at the University of Wisconsin but he remained there for less than a year. Between 1916 and 1919, Toomer attended the University of Chicago and took courses at various colleges including New York University, City College, and the Rand School of Social Science. He also sold cars in Chicago, taught physical education in Milwaukee, and worked as a New Jersey ship fitter.

By 1920, Toomer settled in New York, where he began writing poems and short stories. His publication in the “little magazines” of the literary left brought him into contact with some of the most important writers of the period: Lola Ridge, Claude McKay, Waldo Frank, Sherwood Anderson, and Hart Crane among others. It was the 1923 publication of Cane, however, which put Toomer squarely in the center of the literary movement known as the Harlem Renaissance. A collection of thematically linked poems, character sketches, and short stories, Cane addressed numerous themes, including the destructive influence of industrialization and urbanization on black folk cultures, social stratification within the black community, and the problematic influence of Christianity on African Americans’ responses to racial oppression.

Toomer continued to write but none of his work would receive nearly the same critical acclaim that Cane did. Toomer died in 1967 at the age of 72.

About the Author

Author Profile

Martin Summers, Associate Professor of African and African American Studies at Boston College, received his Ph.D. in U.S. History from Rutgers University in 1997. He taught at the University of Oregon and the University of Texas before moving to Boston College. Professor Summers teaches courses in African American history as well as the history of gender, race and sexuality in the U.S. His publications include Manliness and Its Discontents: The Black Middle Class and the Transformation of Masculinity, 1900-1930 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2004), โ€œDiasporic Brotherhood: Freemasonry and the Transnational Production of Black Middle Class Masculinity,โ€ in Gender and History (November 2003); and โ€œโ€™This Immoral Practiceโ€™: The Prehistory of Homophobia in Black Nationalist Thought,โ€ in Toni Lester, ed., Gender Nonconformity, Race, and Sexuality (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2002). Summers is currently researching race and mental illness in the nineteenth and twentieth-century U.S.

CITE THIS ENTRY IN APA FORMAT:

Summers, M. (2007, January 29). Jean Toomer (1894-1967). BlackPast.org. https://www.blackpast.org/african-american-history/toomer-jean-1894-1967/

Source of the Author's Information:

Cynthia Earl Kerman and Richard Eldridge, The Lives of Jean Toomer:
A Hunger for Wholeness
(Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press,
1987); David Levering Lewis, When Harlem Was in Vogue (New York: Oxford
University Press, 1981); Nellie McKay, Jean Toomer, Artist: A Study of
His Literary Life and Work, 1894-1936
(Chapel Hill: University of North
Carolina Press, 1984).

Further Reading