Jean Toomer

Jean Toomer
Toomer circa 1920-1930

Born December 26, 1894
Washington, D.C., U.S.
Died March 30, 1967 (aged 72)
Doylestown, Pennsylvania,
U.S.
Occupation Writer
Jean Toomer
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Jean Toomer (December 26, 1894
March 30, 1967) was an American poet
and novelist and an important gure of
the Harlem Renaissance and modernism.
His rst book Cane, published in 1923, is
considered by many to be his most
signicant.
[1]
Of mixed race and majority
European ancestry, Toomer struggled to
identify as "an American" and resisted
eorts to classify him as a black writer.
He continued to write poetry, short stories
and essays. After his second marriage in
1934, he moved from New York to
Doylestown, Pennsylvania, where he
became a member of the Religious Society
of Friends (also known as Quakers) and
retired from public life. His papers are
held by the Beinecke Library at Yale
University.
Contents
1 Early life and education
2 Career
2.1 Return to New York
3 Marriage and family
4 Late writing
5 Racial issues
6 Legacy and archives
7 Books by Toomer
8 See also
9 References
10 Further reading
11 External links
Jean Toomer - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Jean_T...
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11.1 Proles
11.2 Articles and archive
Early life and education
Toomer was born Nathan Pinchback Toomer in Washington, D.C. in 1894. His
father Nathan Toomer (1839-1906) was a mixed-race freedman, born into slavery
in 1839 in Chatham County, Georgia. He, his mother Kit and siblings were sold to
John Toomer in Houston County; after his death, they were bought in 1859 from
the estate by John's brother Col. Henry Toomer. Among his siblings was a sister
Fannie, who later married a Mr. Colomon.
[2]
Nathan worked for Henry Toomer as
a personal valet and assistant before and after the Civil War, learning the ways of
the white upper class and later taking his surname.
[3]
By 1869 Nathan Toomer
had married a mulatto woman named Harriet, and they had four daughters,
including Martha, who married Seymour Glover, and Theodosia, who married a
Mr. Braswell.
[2]
By 1870, Nathan Toomer was a farmer and the wealthiest
freedman in Hancock County, with $20,000 in real estate and $10,000 in personal
property.
[4]
Harriet Toomer died on August 17, 1891.
[2]
Nathan Toomer in 1892 married Amanda America Dickson (1849-1893). A
mixed-race woman and daughter of a slave, she was raised by her white planter
father, David Dickson, and grandmother Elizabeth Dickson.
[2]
After his death in
1885, she inherited a 15,000-acre plantation and total estate worth $400,000
from him and was described as the "wealthiest colored woman in America."
[2]
An
agricultural reformer, Dickson and his mother had educated Amanda. In 1866 she
married a white paternal rst cousin and had two sons by him. Unhappy in the
marriage, in 1870 Amanda returned to her father's house. Later she completed
college at Atlanta University. She died in 1893 after about a year of marriage to
Toomer. He and her sons struggled over her estate, but ultimately, he received
almost nothing. Her father's will had left the estate to her sons, and she died
intestate.
[2][3]
In 1893 Toomer married Nina Pinchback (1866-1909), a wealthy young woman of
mixed race. She was born in New Orleans as the third child of people of color free
before the Civil War. Her father P. B. S. Pinchback was of majority European
heritage, from several nationalities, and also of African and Cherokee descent. He
served as an ocer in the Union Army; he became a Republican politician in
Louisiana during the Reconstruction era and was the rst African American to
serve as governor of a U.S. state when he succeeded Henry C. Warmoth. He was
elected to the US Congress and Senate in 1872 and 1873, respectively, but lost
challenges by Democrats in Congress. Her mother Nina (Hawthorne) Pinchback
2 of 12 2014-05-28 21:46
was a free woman of color from Tennessee. Both Pinchback and Hawthorne had
white fathers and mothers of mixed race.
In 1891-1892, with white Democrats establishing Jim Crow laws in Louisiana, the
Pinchbacks had moved to Washington, DC, where they were easily part of the
mulatto elite.
[2][5]
They built a new house o Fourteenth Street, in what
developed as a predominately white, upper-class area of the city. Pinchback was
suspicious of the older Toomer and strongly opposed his daughter's choice for
marriage, but ultimately acquiesced.
[2]
After frequent travels, the senior Nathan Toomer abandoned his wife and son
after the boy was born and returned to Georgia. Nina divorced him and took back
her name of Pinchback; she and her son returned to live with her parents. At that
time, angered by her husband's abandonment, her father insisted they use
another name for her son and started calling him Eugene, after the boy's
godfather.
[6]
The boy also was given a variety of nicknames by various family
members. As a child in Washington, Toomer attended segregated black schools.
When his mother re-married and they moved to suburban New Rochelle, New
York, he attended an all-white school. After his mother's death in 1909, Toomer
returned to Washington to live with his Pinchback grandparents. He graduated
from the M Street School, an academic black high school.
[7]
Between 1914 and 1917, Toomer attended six institutions of higher education (the
University of Wisconsin, the Massachusetts College of Agriculture, the American
College of Physical Training in Chicago, the University of Chicago, New York
University, and the City College of New York) studying agriculture, tness,
biology, sociology, and history, but he never completed a degree. His wide
readings among prominent contemporary poets and writers, and the lectures he
attended during his college years, shaped the direction of his writing.
[8]
Career
After leaving college, Toomer returned to Washington, DC. He published some
short stories and continued writing in the volatile social period following World
War I. He worked for some months in a shipyard in 1919, then escaped to
middle-class life. Labor strikes and race riots of whites attacking blacks occurred
in several major industrial cities during the summer of 1919, which was known as
Red Summer. People in the working class were competing after World War I for
jobs and housing, and tensions erupted in violence. In Chicago and other places,
blacks fought back. At the same time, it was a period of artistic ferment.
Toomer devoted several months to the study of Eastern philosophies and
continued to be interested in this subject. Some of his early writing was political,
and he published three essays from 1919-1920 in the prominent socialist paper
3 of 12 2014-05-28 21:46
New York Call. His work drew from the socialist and "New Negro" movements of
New York.
[5]
Toomer was reading much new American writing, for instance Waldo
Frank's Our America (1919).
[9]
In 1919, he adopted Jean Toomer as his literary
name, and it was the way he was known for most of his adult life.
[10]
By his early adult years, Toomer resisted racial classications and wanted to be
identied only as an American.
[7][8]
Accurately claiming ancestry among seven
ethnic and national groups, he gained experience in both white and "colored"
societies, and resisted being classied as a Negro writer, although he grudgingly
allowed his publisher of Cane wanted to use that term to increase sales.
[11]
As
Richard Eldridge has noted, Toomer "sought to transcend standard denitions of
race. I think he never claimed that he was a white man, Mr. Eldridge said. He
always claimed that he was a representative of a new, emergent race that was a
combination of various races. He averred this virtually throughout his life.
[12]
William Andrews has noted he "was one of the rst writers to move beyond the
idea that any black ancestry makes you black."
[12]
In 1921 Toomer took a job for a few months as a principal at a new rural
agricultural and industrial school for blacks in Sparta, Georgia. Southern schools
were continuing to recruit teachers from the North, although they had also
trained generations of teachers since the Civil War. The school was in the center
of Hancock County and the Black Belt 100 miles southeast of Atlanta, near where
his father had lived. Exploring his father's roots in Hancock County, Toomer
learned that he sometimes passed for white.
[2]
Seeing the life of rural blacks,
accompanied by racial segregation and virtual labor peonage in the Deep South,
led Toomer to identify more strongly as an African American. Several lynchings of
black men took place in Georgia during 1921-1922, as whites continued to
enforce white supremacy with violence. In 1908 the state had ratied a
constitution that disfranchised most blacks and many poor whites by raising
requirements to voter registration. This situation was virtually maintained to the
1960s, when federal legislation was passed to enforce constitutional rights.
By Toomer's time, the state was suering labor shortages due to thousands of
rural blacks leaving in the Great Migration to the North and Midwest. Trying to
control their movement, the legislature passed laws to prevent outmigration. It
also established high license fees for Northern employers recruiting labor in the
state. Planters feared losing their pool of cheap labor. This period was a formative
experience for Toomer; he started writing about it while still in Georgia and
submitted the long story "Georgia Night" to The Liberator in New York from
Hancock County.
[5][7]
Return to New York
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Jean Toomer's passport (1926)
Toomer returned to New York, where he became friends with Waldo Frank. They
had an intense friendship through 1923, and Frank served as his mentor and
editor on his novel Cane.
[9]
Afterward they had strong dierences.
[13]
In 1923, Toomer published the High Modernist novel Cane, in which he used a
variety of forms and material inspired by his time in Georgia. It was also an
"analysis of class and caste", with "secrecy and miscegenation as major themes of
the rst section".
[5]
He had conceived it as a short-story cycle. Toomer
acknowledged the inuence of Sherwood Anderson's Winesburg, Ohio (1919) as
his model, in addition to other inuential works of that period. He also appeared
to have absorbed The Waste Land of T. S. Eliot and considered him one of the
American group of writers he wanted to join, "artists and intellectuals who were
engaged in renewing American society at its multi-cultural core."
[9]
Many scholars have considered Cane to be
Toomer's best work.
[1]
A series of poems and
short stories about the black experience in
America, Cane was hailed by critics and is seen
as an important work of both the Harlem
Renaissance and Modernism. But Toomer
resisted racial classication and did not want
to be marketed as a Negro writer. As he wrote
to his publisher Horace Liveright, "My racial
composition and my position in the world are
realities that I alone may determine."
[14]
Toomer found it more dicult to get published
throughout the 1930s and the Great
Depression, as did many authors.
In the 1920s, Toomer and Frank were among many Americans who were very
interested in the work of the spiritual leader George Ivanovitch Gurdjie, from the
Russian Empire, who had a lecture tour in the United States in 1924. That year,
and in 1926 and 1927, Toomer went to France for periods of study with Gurdjie,
who had settled at Fontainebleau. He was a student of Gurdjie until the
mid-1930s.
[8]
Much of his writing from this period on was related to his spiritual quest and
featured allegories. He no longer explored African-American characters. Some
scholars have attributed Toomer's artistic silence to his ambivalence about his
identity in a culture based on forcing binary racial distinctions.
[12]
Marriage and family
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Jean Toomer and
Margery Latimer
In 1931 Toomer married the writer Margery Latimer in
Wisconsin. During their travels on the West Coast
following their marriage, it was covered in sensational
terms by a Hearst reporter, and an anti-miscegenation
scandal broke, incorporating rumors about the
commune they had organized earlier that year in
Portage, Wisconsin. West Coast and Midwest press
outlets were aroused and Time magazine sent a
reporter to interview them. He was criticized violently
by some for marrying a white woman.
[15][16]
Latimer
was a respected young writer known for her rst two
novels and short stories. The following year she died in
childbirth in August 1932; he named their only
daughter Margery in her memory.
In 1934 Toomer married a second time, to Marjorie Content, daughter of a
wealthy Jewish stockbroker and his wife. Because Toomer was notable as a writer,
this marriage also attracted notice. In 1940 the Toomers moved to Doylestown,
Pennsylvania. There he formally joined the Quakers and began to withdraw from
society. Toomer wrote extensively from 1935 to 1940 about relationships between
the genders, inuenced by his Gurdjie studies, as well as Jungian psychology.
[17]
He had fundamentally traditional views about men and women, which he put in
symbolic terms.
In 1939 Toomer changed his name again, to "Nathan Jean Toomer", to emphasize
that he was male. He may also have been reaching toward his paternal ancestry
with it. He usually signed his name N. Jean Toomer, and continued to be called
"Jean" by friends.
[10]
Late writing
He had continued with his spiritual exploration, traveling to India in 1939. Later
he studied the psychology developed by Carl Jung, the mystic Edgar Cayce, and
the Church of Scientology.
Toomer wrote a small amount of ction in this later period. Mostly he published
essays in Quaker publications during these years. He devoted most of his time to
serving on Quaker committees for community service and working with high
school students.
[18]
His last literary work published during his lifetime was Blue Meridian, a long
poem extolling "the potential of the American race".
[18]
He stopped writing for
publication after 1950. He continued to write for himself, including several
autobiographies. He died in 1967 after several years of poor health.
[8]
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Racial issues
Toomer's appearance was "racially indeterminate".
[12]
As noted above, not
wanting to be bound by race and claiming to be an American and representing a
new mixed culture, he lived in both white and black societies during his life. He
resisted being classied as a Negro writer, although his most enduring work was
Cane, inspired by his time in the South and imaginative exploration of his absent
father's world. He was born into slavery and as a freedman had become
successful as a farmer, marrying two elite women in succession.
In preparing a new edition of that work, scholars Henry Louis Gates, Jr. and
Rudolph P. Byrd said in 2010 that, based on their research, they believe that
Toomer passed for white in his life.
[12] [19]
They note that in the 1920 and 1930
censuses he was classied as white. (At that time, such data was provided by the
census taker, often based on appearance, class, area of residence, etc.) He twice
had been classied (or registered) as Negro in draft registration in 1917 and
1942. When Toomer married Marjorie Latimer, a white woman, in Wisconsin in
1931, the license noted both as white.
[12]
Other scholars disagree with Gates' and
Byrd's interpretation, while acknowledging that Toomer tried to stretch racial
boundaries. William Andrews said, If people didnt ask, he said, I expect he
didnt tell.
[12]
Legacy and archives
Toomer's papers and unpublished manuscripts are held by the Beinecke
Library at Yale University.
[8]
When Cane was reprinted in 1969, it was favorably reviewed as a "Black
Classic", leading to a revival of interest in Toomer's work.
[5]
Since the late 20th century, collections of Toomer's poetry and essays have
been published, and his Essentials was republished; he self-published it in
1931. It included "Gurdjiean aphorisms".
[18]
2002, Toomer was elected to the Georgia Hall of Fame.
[18]
Books by Toomer
Cane (New York: Boni and Liveright, 1923) ISBN 0-87140-151-7
Problems of Civilization, by Ellsworth Huntington, Whiting Williams, Jean
Toomer and others, (New York: D. Van Nostrand Co., 1929)
7 of 12 2014-05-28 21:46
Essentials: Denitions and Aphorisms (Chicago: Lakeside Press, 1931)
An Interpretation of Friends Worship (Philadelphia: Committee on Religious
Education of Friends General Conference, 1947)
The Flavor of Man (Philadelphia: Young Friends Movement of the
Philadelphia Yearly Meeting, 1949)
The Collected Poems of Jean Toomer (Chapel Hill: University of North
Carolina Press, 1988) ISBN 0-8078-4209-5
The Letters of Jean Toomer, 1919-1924 (http://books.google.com
/books?id=kJFOJpnheGkC&
dq=%27In+the+Land+of+Cotton%27:+Economics+and+Violence+in+Jean
+Toomer%27s+Cane,%22+%27%27African+American+Review%27%27&
source=gbs_navlinks_s), University of Tennessee Press, 2006
See also
List of African American writers
References
^
a b
Poetry Foundation prole (http://www.poetryfoundation.org/bio/jean-toomer) 1.
^
a b c d e f g h i
Kent Anderson Leslie and Willard B. Gatewood Jr. "'This Father of
Mine ... a Sort of Mystery': Jean Toomer's Georgia Heritage" (http://www.jstor.org
/discover/10.2307/40582942?uid=3739744&uid=2129&uid=2134&uid=20405288&
uid=2&uid=70&uid=3&uid=20405280&uid=3739256&uid=60&
sid=21103743117767), Georgia Historical Quarterly 77 (winter 1993)
2.
^
a b
Kent Anderson Leslie, "Amanda America Dickson, (1849-1893)"
(http://www.georgiaencyclopedia.org/articles/history-archaeology/amanda-america-
dickson-1849-1893), History and Archaeology, New Georgia Encyclopedia, 2003/2013
3.
^ "Nathan Toomer", Hancock County, GA; US Census 4.
^
a b c d e
Charles Scruggs, Lee VanDeMarr, Jean Toomer and the Terrors of
American History (http://books.google.com/books?id=dJUrdwcdsAwC&
dq=Jean+Toomer+and+the+Harlem+Renaissance&printsec=frontcover&
source=in&hl=en&ei=ukIyTbyGPMOclger-dC6Cg&sa=X&oi=book_result&
ct=result&resnum), University of Pennsylvania Press, 1998, "Introduction", accessed
15 January 2011
5.
^ Cynthia Earl Kerman, The Lives of Jean Toomer: A Hunger for Wholeness 6.
8 of 12 2014-05-28 21:46
(http://books.google.com/books?id=PD3jxWlrGpQC&
q=Marjorie+Content#v=snippet&q=Marjorie%20Content&f=false), LSU Press,
1989, p. 29
^
a b c
"Jean Toomer" (http://www.poets.org/poet.php/prmPID/71), Poets.org,
accessed 27 Dec 2010
7.
^
a b c d e
Jones, Robert B. "Jean Toomer's Life and Career"
(http://www.english.illinois.edu/maps/poets/s_z/toomer/life.htm). Modern American
Poetry. Urbana-Champaign, Illinois: Department of English, University of Illinois.
Retrieved 29 May 2012.
8.
^
a b c
Charles Scruggs, Jean Toomer and the Harlem Renaissance - book review
(http://ndarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m2838/is_1_36/ai_85185735/), African American
Review, Spring, 2002, accessed 15 January 2011
9.
^
a b
Kerman (1989), The Lives of Jean Toomer, p. 29 10.
^ "Introduction," The Letters of Jean Toomer, 1919-1924 (http://books.google.com
/books?id=kJFOJpnheGkC&
dq=%27In+the+Land+of+Cotton%27:+Economics+and+Violence+in+Jean+Toomer
%27s+Cane,%22+%27%27African+American+Review%27%27&
source=gbs_navlinks_s), University of Tennessee Press, 2006
11.
^
a b c d e f g
FELICIA R. LEE, "Scholars Say Chronicler of Black Life Passed for
White" (http://www.nytimes.com/2010/12/27/books/27cane.html?scp=3&
sq=%22jean%20toomer%22&st=cse&_r=0), New York Times, 26 December 2010,
accessed 27 March 2014
12.
^ Brother Mine: The Correspondence of Jean Toomer and Waldo Frank, Edited by
Kathleen Pfeier, Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 2010
13.
^ Harmon, Charles. "Cane, Race, and 'Neither/Norism'" (http://www.jstor.org
/pss/20078269), Southern Literary Journal, 2000 Spring; 32 (2): 90-101, accessed 15
January 2011.
14.
^ "Races: Just Americans". Time 19 (13): 21. March 28, 1932. 15.
^ Anastasia Carol Curwood, Stormy Weather: Middle-Class African American
Marriages between the Two World Wars (http://books.google.com
/books?id=CsF0gBhQdbcC&dq=obituary+Margery+Latimer+-+NY+Times&
q=Jean+Toomer#v=snippet&q=Jean%20Toomer&f=false), University of North
Carolina Press, 2010, p. 75
16.
^ Curwood (2010), Stormy Weather, pp. 74-79 17.
^
a b c d
Keith Hulett, "Jean Toomer" (http://www.georgiaencyclopedia.org
/nge/Article.jsp?id=h-1241&hl=y), New Georgia Encyclopedia Library, accessed 8
February 2011
18.
9 of 12 2014-05-28 21:46
^ "A new look at the life of Jean Toomer" (http://www.npr.org/2010/12/30/132488862
/A-New-Look-At-The-Life-Of-Jean-Toomer) NPR, (Robert Siegel and Professor Byrd),
30 December 2010. (Transcript and audio, 5 mins)
19.
Further reading
Brother Mine: The Correspondence of Jean Toomer and Waldo Frank, Edited
by Kathleen Pfeier, Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 2010
Barbara Foley, "'In the Land of Cotton': Economics and Violence in Jean
Toomer's Cane," African American Review 32 (summer 1998).
Barbara Foley, "Jean Toomer's Sparta," American Literature 67 (December
1995).
Jean Toomer and the Harlem Renaissance, editors Michael Feith and
Genevieve Fabre. (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 2000. ISBN
0-8135-2846-1
Cynthia Earl Kerman and Richard Eldridge, The Lives of Jean Toomer: A
Hunger for Wholeness (http://books.google.com/books/about
/The_Lives_of_Jean_Toomer.html?id=PD3jxWlrGpQC) (Baton Rouge:
Louisiana State University Press, 1987), online at Googlebooks.
Nellie Y. McKay, Jean Toomer, Artist: A Study of His Literary 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
Black Literature (Google eBook) (http://books.google.com
/books?id=9YdA9szqvJ0C&pg=PA196&
dq=Jean+Toomer,+Artist:+A+Study+of+His+Literary+Life+and+Work,+18
94-1936&source=gbs_toc_r&cad=4#v=onepage&q=Jean%20Toomer
%2C%20Artist
%3A%20A%20Study%20of%20His%20Literary%20Life%20and%20Work
%2C%201894-1936&f=false), University of Iowa Press, 1989
Turner, Darwin T. "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: Collected Poems
1976-2006 (Indianapolis: Dog Ear Publishing, 2006, p. 17.) First published in
Xavier Review 23, no. 2 (Fall 2003).
10 of 12 2014-05-28 21:46
External links
Proles
Poetry Foundation prole (http://www.poetryfoundation.org/bio/jean-toomer)
"Jean Toomer" (http://hdl.handle.net/10079/fa/beinecke.toomer), Jean Toomer
Papers, Beinecke Library, Yale University
"Jean Toomer" (http://www.libs.uga.edu/gawriters/toomer.html), Georgia
Writers Hall of Fame, University of Georgia
Charles Scruggs, "Jean Toomer" (http://www.english.uiuc.edu/maps/poets
/s_z/toomer/toomer.htm), Modern American Poetry, University of Illinois,
Champaign-Urbana
Prole and poems at Poets.org (http://www.poets.org/poet.php/prmPID/71)
Articles and archive
Barbara Foley, "Jean Toomer's Washington and the Politics of Class: From
'Blue Veins' to Seventh-Street Rebels", Modern Fiction Studies 42 (Summer
1996), 289-321.
Dan Schneider, "Book Review: 'Cane'" (http://www.hackwriters.com
/Cane.htm), Hackwriters, May 2006.
Felicia R. Lee, "Scholars Say Chronicler of Black Life Passed for White"
(http://www.nytimes.com/2010/12/27/books/27cane.html?scp=3&
sq=%22jean%20toomer%22&st=cse), New York Times, 26 December 2010.
"A new look at the life of Jean Toomer" (http://www.npr.org/2010/12
/30/132488862/A-New-Look-At-The-Life-Of-Jean-Toomer) NPR, (Robert Siegel
and Professor Byrd), 30 December 2010. (Transcript and audio, 5 mins)
Retrieved from "http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Jean_Toomer&
oldid=609964580"
Categories: 1894 births 1967 deaths 20th-century American novelists
African-American writers African-American poets American male novelists
African-American novelists Modernist writers Converts to Quakerism
American Quakers People from New Rochelle, New York
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