Jean Toomer

Jean Toomer (birth name: Nathan Pinchback Toomer ; born December 26, 1894 in Washington, DC , † March 30, 1967 in Doylestown , Bucks County , Pennsylvania ) was an American writer , who through his novel Cane became an important representative of Harlem Renaissance , a direction within African American literature in American literature , became.

Life

Toomer was on his mother's side a grandson of PBS Pinchback , who became governor of Louisiana in 1872 and thus became the first African American to become governor of a US state .

After attending school, he studied at the University of Wisconsin , City College of New York and the University of Chicago . Later he also took courses in meditation at the Gurdjieff Institute in France .

He made his literary debut in 1923 with the novel Cane , making him one of the leading exponents of the Harlem Renaissance in African American literature. In Cane is a thoroughly modernist and experimental , though sometimes informally appearing work that prose , poetry and drama together.

After Essentials (1931), a collection of aphorisms , Portage Potential (1932) appeared during his lifetime . The anthologies The Wayward and the Seeking (1980) and The Collected Poems of Jean Toomer (1988) only appeared posthumously .

In addition to his two marriages , including one with a descendant of the Puritan theologian John Cotton , Toomer also had romantic relationships with Margaret Naumberg Frank, the wife of the writer Waldo Frank , and with the painter Georgia O'Keeffe .

Works (selection)

Letters

• Kathleen Pfeiffer (Ed.): Brother mine. The correspondence of Jean Toomer and Waldo Frank . University Press, Urbana, Ill. 2010, ISBN 978-0-252-03540-1 .
• Mark Whalan (Ed.): The Letters of Jean Toomer, 1919-1924 . University of Tennessee Press, Knoxville 2006, ISBN 1-57233-470-3 .

Single issues

• Sugar cane ("Cane", 1923). Ullstein, Frankfurt / M. 1985, ISBN 3-548-30176-2 (The woman in literature).

Work editions

• John C. Griffin (Ed.): The uncollected works of Jean Toomer. 1894-1967 . Mellen, Lewiston 2003, ISBN 0-7734-6810-2 .
• Robert B. Jones (Ed.): The collected poems of Jean Toomer . University Press, Chapel Hell, NC 1988, ISBN 0-8078-1773-2 .
• Frederic L. Rusch (Ed.): A Jean Toomer Reader . University Press, New York 1993, ISBN 0-19-507733-4 .
• Darwin T. Turner (Ed.): The wayward and the seeking. A collection of writings by Jean Toomer . University Press, Washington 1980, ISBN 0-88258-014-0 .

literature

• Darwin T. Turner: In a Minor Chord. Three Afro-American Writers and Their Search for Identity . Southern Illinois University Press, Carbondale 1971, ISBN 0-8093-0481-3 .
• Brian J. Benson, Mabel M. Dillard: Jean Toomer (Twayne United States authors Series; 389). Twayne Publ., Boston 1980, ISBN 0-8057-7322-3 .
• Nellie McKay : Jean Toomer, artist. A Study of his Literary Life and Work, 1894-1936 . University of North Carolina Press, Chapel Hill 1984, ISBN 0-8078-1583-7 .
• Cynthia E. Kerman, Richard Eldridge: The Lives of Jean Toomer. A Hunger for Wholeness . Louisiana State University Press, Baton Rouge 1987, ISBN 0-8071-1354-9 .
• Therman B. O'Daniel (Ed.): Jean Toomer. A critical evaluation . Howard University Press, Washington, DC 1988, ISBN 0-88258-111-2 .
• Rudolph P. Byrd: Jean Toomer's Years with Gurdjieff . Portrait of an Artist, 1923-1936 . University of Georgia Press, Athens 1990, ISBN 0-8203-1248-7 .
• Charles R. Larson: Invisible Darkness. Jean Toomer and Nella Larsen . University of Iowa Press, Iowa City 1993, ISBN 0-87745-425-6 .
• Robert B. Jones: Jean Toomer and the Prison-House of Thought. A Phenomenology of the Spirit , University of Massachusetts Press, Amherst 1993, ISBN 0-87023-860-4 .
• Charles Scruggs: Jean Toomer and the Terrors of American History . University of Pennsylvania Press, Philadelphia 1998, ISBN 0-8122-3451-0 .
• Michel Feith, Genevieve E. Fabre (Eds.): Jean Toomer and the Harlem Renaissance . Rutgers University Press, New Brunswick, NJ 2000, ISBN 0-8135-2846-1 .
• John C. Griffin: Biography of American Author Jean Toomer, 1894-1967 (Studies in American Literature; BD. 52). Edwin Mellen Press, Lewiston, NY 2002, ISBN 0-7734-7088-3 .
• Nathan Grant: Masculinist impulses. Toomer, Hurston, Black Writing, and Modernity . University of Missouri Press, Columbia 2004, ISBN 0-8262-1516-5 .
• Emmanuel Egar: The Poetics of Rage. Wole Soyinka , Jean Toomer, and Claude McKay . University Press of America, Lanham, Md. 2005, ISBN 0-7618-3150-9 .
• Karen J. Ford: Split-Gut Song. Jean Toomer and the Poetics of Modernity . University of Alabama Press, Tuscaloosa 2005, ISBN 0-8173-1456-3 .
• Robert B. Jones (Ed.): Jean Toomer. Selected essays and literary criticism . University Press, Knoxville 1996, ISBN 0-87049-938-6 .

Individual evidence

1. ↑ The other two authors are Countee Cullen and Zora Neale Hurston .

Web links

• Literature by and about Jean Toomer in the catalog of the German National Library
• Jean Toomer in nndb (English)