Born in Washington DC, December 26, 1894, with the name of Nathan Pinchback Toomer, Jean Toomer, was a leading figure of the Harlem Renaissance. His maternal grandfather was Louisiana Governor Pinckney Benton Stewart Pinchback, the first Black governor in the history of the United States. The Pinchbacks lived in a racially mixed neighborhood. His family moved to New Rochelle, New York, in 1906. He spent his childhood attending both Whites-only schools and Black-only schools, as was the custom during racial segregation in the United States.
Upon his mother’s death in 1909, Nathan moved back to Washington and his grandparents. He attended the very good all-Black Dunbar High School. After graduation in 1914, he renounced racial classifications and sought to live not as a member of any racial group but as an American. After graduating from Dunbar High School in Washington, Toomer enrolled in the agriculture program at the University of Wisconsin but he remained there for less than a year. Between 1916 and 1919, Toomer attended the University of Chicago and took courses at various colleges including New York University, City College, and the Rand School of Social Science. He never graduated from any of the schools.
After leaving college, Toomer published some short stories, devoted several months to the study of Eastern philosophies and took a job as a principal in Sparta, Georgia. The segregation Toomer experienced in the South led Toomer to identify more strongly as an African-American. It was in Chicago that Jean Toomer began to broaden his interest in literature: William Shakespeare, Sherwood Anderson, Leo Tolstoy, and all the major American poets, especially the imagists.
The college readings and lectures shaped the direction he wanted to give his writing. After leaving college, Toomer published a few short stories and spent a few months studying Eastern philosophies while working as a principal in Sparta, Georgia. By 1920, Toomer settled in New York, where he began writing poems and short stories. From 1920 to 1922 Toomer wrote passionately, filling a trunk with poems, essays, short stories, and letters. Toomer made the acquaintance of Waldo Frank, a famous novelist of the time who became his friend and mentor.
It was also during this time that Toomer wrote the short stories “Bona and Paul” and “Withered Skin of Berries,” the plays Natalie Mann (1922) and Balo (1922), and many poems such as “Five Vignettes,” “Skyline,” “Poem in C,” “Gum,” and “The First American.” In 1923 Toomer published the novel “Cane”, an important modernist work. It is considered by many scholars to be his best work. A series of poems and short stories about the Black experience in America, Cane was hailed by critics and is seen as an important work of both the Harlem Renaissance and the Lost Generation.
Sociologist Charles S. Johnson called it “the most astonishingly brilliant beginning of any Negro writer of his generation”. Toomer resisted being classified as a “Negro” writer, as he identified as “American”. The work is also categorized with that of other writers of the time, such as Gertrude Stein, and T.S. Eliot, for its contributions to Modernism. In his introduction to Cane, Waldo Frank wrote that, “a poet has arisen among our American youth who has known how to turn the essences and material of his Southland into the essences and materials of literature.”
Toomer also wrote extensively for the Dial and other little magazines and was the author of several experimental plays. In 1926 he attended the Gurdjieff Institute in France, dedicated to the expansion of consciousness and meditation. After studying with Gurdjieff in France, Toomer began to preach his teachings in Harlem and to offer workshops in other parts of the country in the late 1920s and early ’30s. Cane addressed numerous themes, including the destructive influence of industrialization and urbanization on Black folk cultures, social stratification within the Black community.
In the spring of 1934 Jean Toomer meets Marjorie Content, the daughter of a very wealthy member of the New York Stock Exchange. They marry in Taos, New Mexico that year in September. It was very difficult for Toomer to publish in the 1930s. In 1940 he and his wife moved to Doylestown, Pennsylvania, where he became a Quaker and began to retire from worldly life. Toomer wrote some fiction and published essays in Quaker publications, but he devoted most of his time to Quaker committees.