Jean Toomer

Toomer was born in Washington, D.C., to a family prominent enough in the capital's small Black elite that as a light-skinned child he moved between Black and white schools depending on the neighborhood, an early lesson in how thin America's racial categories actually were, one his fiction would spend a career interrogating. A brief 1921 teaching stint at a Georgia industrial school, immersing him in a rural Black South utterly unlike Washington, supplied Cane's raw material.

Cane, published in 1923, braided prose sketches, poems, and a closing play into a single wrenching arc from rural Georgia to urban Washington and back, and critics from Waldo Frank to later scholars have called it modernism's first great work of African American fiction. Toomer, though, increasingly rejected the racial label put on the book and on him.

He spent the following decades pursuing Gurdjieff's mystical teachings, promoting an identity beyond race entirely, and publishing little else of consequence. He died in Pennsylvania in 1967, largely estranged from the literary movement Cane had helped launch.