Description
“A breakthrough in prose and poetical writing. . . . This book should be on all readers’ and writers’ desks and in their minds.”—Maya Angelou
First published in 1923, Jean Toomer’s Cane is an innovative literary work—part drama, part poetry, part fiction—powerfully evoking black life in the South. Rich in imagery, Toomer’s impressionistic, sometimes surrealistic sketches of Southern rural and urban life are permeated by visions of smoke, sugarcane, dusk, and fire; the northern world is pictured as a harsher reality of asphalt streets. This iconic work of American literature is published with a new afterword by Rudolph Byrd of Emory University and Henry Louis Gates Jr. of Harvard University, who provide groundbreaking biographical information on Toomer, place his writing within the context of American modernism and the Harlem Renaissance, and examine his shifting claims about his own race and his pioneering critique of race as a scientific or biological concept.
Also By: Henry Louis Gates Jr. 
Twelve Years a Slave: A Norton Critical Edition
First Edition, E Book, 2021
This Norton Critical Edition of Solomon Northup’s harrowing autobiography is based on the 1853 first edition. It is accompanied by Henry Louis Gates, Jr.’s introduction and detailed explanatory...
The Annotated African American Folktales
Hardback, 2017
Collected for the first time, these African American folktales reclaim a lost cultural legacy to redefine American literature.
The Annotated African American Folktales
E Book, 2017
Collected for the first time, these African American folktales reclaim a lost cultural legacy to redefine American literature.
Twelve Years a Slave: A Norton Critical Edition
First Edition, Paperback, 2017
This Norton Critical Edition of Solomon Northup’s harrowing autobiography is based on the 1853 first edition. It is accompanied by Henry Louis Gates, Jr.’s introduction and detailed explanatory...
Picturing Frederick Douglass: An Illustrated Biography of the Nineteenth Century's Most Photographed American
Hardback, 2015
A landmark and collectible duotone volume, that now canonises Frederick Douglass through historic photography.
