Virtuoso, mystic, and modernist author of the first mature work of the post–World War I Southern Renaissance, Nathan Eugene "Jean" Toomer was an alienated seeker, a forerunner of the racial neutrality of 1990s multiculturalism. A steadfast humanist, he was uncertain of his ethnic makeup yet identified solidly with black themes. He once said, "I am of no particular race. I am of the human race, a man at large in the human world, preparing a new race." A metrical whiz, he assimilated social themes into a varied canon; like his friends, poets Langston Hughes and Hart Crane, he attempted to transform jazz into verse. Along with Richard Wright's Native Son and Ralph Ellison's The Invisible Man, publication of Toomer's creative montage Cane (1923) was a defining moment in Harlem's era of artistic experimentation.
Toomer was born on December 26, 1894, in Washington, D.C. Following his parents' divorce, he faced social and financial ruin after his mother married an irresponsible man and settled in New Rochelle, New York. At her death in 1909, he moved in with his grandfather, Pinckney Benton Stewart Pinchback, son of a slave woman and a Louisiana lieutenant governor during Reconstruct-ion. He enrolled at six institutions and studied law at the University of Wisconsin and history at City College of New York but gave up on scholastics and returned to Washington to manage the Howard Theater. In 1922, he took his first job in education, a four-month stint as principal of an agricultural and industrial academy in Sparta, Georgia. The experience — his only direct contact with the South — generated a rhapsodic love of Negro spirituals and folklore.
