Toomer was influenced by poets William Blake and Walt Whitman and the artistic genius of novelist James Joyce. He associated with other black writers at the stylish salons hosted by Ethel Ray Nance and Georgia Douglas Johnson. The support of editor Jessie Redmon Fauset encouraged Toomer to publish poems, excerpts, sketches of Southern life, and short fiction. His stark picture of Southern segregation powered Cane, an experimental three-part study of black identity and citizenship in the United States. The work, set in Georgia, enlarges on Afro-centrism and prefigures the vast black migration to Chicago, Washington, D.C., and other northeastern urban centers and the "black is beautiful" movement of the 1960s and 1970s. The mixed-genre text contains verse, sketches, commentary, and drama. Its inventiveness earned him a place at the Harlem symposium of young artists in March 1924, when he, Langston Hughes, and Countée Cullen received accolades from W. E. B. Du Bois, James Weldon Johnson, and Alain Locke, the revered elder statesmen of the Harlem Renaissance.
In 1923, the Howard University Players performed Toomer's poorly conceived play, Balo, A Sketch of Negro Life, a study of black Georgian peasant life. That same year, he failed to find a producer for Kabnis (1923), a modern drama based on his experiences while teaching in Georgia. Restless and dissatisfied, he moved from New York to Chicago and then to France. In Fontainebleau, France, he came under the influence of Russian mystic Georges Ivanovitch Gurdjieff's Institute for the Harmonious Development of Man, a utopist gathering intent on founding an ideal society based on mutual understanding. After returning to the United States, Toomer lost his readership while sponsoring a Gurdjieff colony on Chicago's Gold Coast.
