Description
Born Washington, D.C.Writer and philosopher Jean Toomer was an influential voice in the African American cultural resurgence known as the Harlem Renaissance. Best known for Cane (1923), a novel of innovative modernist style that juxtaposed scenes in the urban North with observations about the rural South, Toomer was sensitive to the role that race played in American society. Yet he tried to look beyond race as a category that defined individuals. The grandson of the first U.S. governor of African American descent and the product of an interracial marriage, Toomer bristled at being described as a “Negro writer.” Having “seen the divisions, the separatisms and the antagonisms,” he believed optimistically that “a new man was arising in this country—not European, not African, not Asiatic—but American.”
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Pastel On Illustration Board
National Portrait Gallery, Smithsonian Institution; gift of Lawrence A. Fleischman and Howard Garfinkle with a matching grant from the National Endowment for the Arts
