Description

Photograph of a young Jean Toomer, pictured around the turn of the twentieth century. Toomer was born in 1894 in Washington, D.C., and grew up there. His father was a Georgian and the widower of a wealthy Georgia landowner, Amanda America Dickson.Toomer is best known as the author of the 1923 novel Cane, an influential work about African American life in which Toomer drew largely on his experiences in Hancock County, Georgia. Toomer wrote Cane after he left his home in Washington, D.C., and worked briefly as a substitute principal at a black industrial school in the middle Georgia town of Sparta. There he experienced a creative outpouring of poetry, drama, stories, and sketches that formed Cane, a narrative that begins in the rural South, switches to the urban North, and returns to the South for its conclusion. "Sempter," the southern setting of Cane, is modeled on Sparta and the people and places Toomer encountered there in the fall of 1921.

Record Contributed By

New Georgia Encyclopedia

Record Harvested From

Digital Library of Georgia