"Jean Toomer"(December 26,1894-March 30,1967)

Was an American poet and novelist and an important figure of the Harlem Renaissance.His first

book  Cane is considered by many as his most significant.He was born Nathan Pinchback Toomer in Washington,D.C.his father was a prosperous farmer,originally born into slavery in Hancock County Georgia.Nina Pinchback was also of mixed race of ethnic descent.Her father was Louisiana Governor P.B.S. Pinchback,the first African American to become governor of a U.S. state.(Both of Jean maternal grandparents had white fathers.)His father was a planter and his mother was a mulatto slave who was freed before his birth.After Reconstruction the Pinchbacks had moved to Washington,DC,where they became part of the "mulatto elite."Jean father (also called Nathan Toomer) abandoned the family when his son was an infant,and Jean and his mother lived with her parents.As a child in Washington,he attended all black schools.When his mother remarried and they moved to suburban New Rochelle,New York,he attended an all-white school.After his mother's death,he returned to live with his grandparents.He graduated from the M Street School,an academic black high school.By his early adult years Jean resisted racial classifications to be identified only as an American.Between 1914 and 1917 Jean attended six institutions of higher educations (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,fitness,biology,sociology,and history,but he never completed a degree.His wide readings  among prominent poets and writers,and the lectureshe attended during his college years,shaped the directions of his writing.After leaving college,he published some short stories and continued writing in the volatile social period following World War 1.He worked for some months in a shipyard in 1919,then escaped to middle-class life.Labor strikes and race riots occurred in several major cities during the summer of 1919,and artistic ferment was high.He devoted several months to the study of Eastern philosophies and continued to be interested in this.some of the early writing was political,and he published three essays from 1919-1920 in the prominent socialist paper New York Call.They drew from the socialist and "New Negro" movements of New York.Jean was reading much new American writing,for instance Waldo Frank's Our America (1919).In 1921 Jean  took a job for a few months as a principal at a new rural agricultural and industrial school for blacks in Sparta,Georgia.It was in the center of Hancock County and in the Black Belt  100 miles of Atlanta.His exploration of his father's roots in Hancock County,as being forced into witnessing the segregation and labor peonage of the Deep South,led him to identify more strongly as an African American.Several lynching took place in Georgia during 1921-1922,continuing to enforce white supremacy with violence.In 1908 the state had ratified a constitution essentially disfranchising blacks;by Jean time it passed laws to prevent outmigration and established high licenses fees for employers recruiting labor in the state.African Americans had started their Great Migration north and planters feared losing their pool of cheap labor.it was a formative experience for Jean,he started writing about it while still in Georgia and submitted the long story "Georgia Night"to the Liberator in New York while there.Jean returned to New York where he became friends with Waldo Frank,who also served as his mentor and editor on his novel Cane.In 1923,he 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 first section.He had conceived it as a short-story cycle,and acknowledged the influence of Sherwood Anderson's Winesburg,Ohio (1919) as his model,in addition to other influential works  of that period.Jean also appeared to have absorbed T.S. Eliot's The Wasteland and considered him one of the American group of writers he wanted to join,"artist and intellectuals who were engaged in renewing American society at its multi-cultural core.Many scholars considered Cane to be his best work.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 the Lost Generation.Jean resisted racial classification and did not want the book marketed as black work.As he said to his publisher Horace Liveright,"My racial composition in the world are realities that i alone may determine.He found it more difficult to get published throughout the 1930s,as did many authors during the Great Depression.Hebecame interested in the work of the spirtual leader George Ivanovitch Gurdjieff,who a lecture tour in the United States in 1924.That year,and in 1926 and 1927,Jean went to france to study with George,who had settled at Fontainebleau.He was a student of George until the mid-1930s.In 1931 he married the writer Margery Latimer.The following year she died in childbirth in August 1932and he named their only daughter Margery.In 1934 he married a second time,to Majorie Content.Because Jean was notable as a writer, his two marriages both classed as inter-racial,attracted notice and some social criticism.In 1940 the Toomers moved to Doylestown,Pennsylvania.There he formally joined the Quakers and began to withdraw from society.