h Waldo Frank published in the most important journals. The result, for Toomer, was a book, Cane.In 1923 Cane was published together with Waldo Frank's Holiday . Frank was a mentor for Toomer, reading much of his work before publication. Toomer edited the manuscript of and actually wrote all the dialogue in Holiday.A few "important" white people thought Cane was an extraordinary work. At a time when the best (or popular) novelists, poets, and publishers had fame not unlike the movie and rock stars of today, Waldo Frank, said,"[Cane ] is a harbinger of the South's literary maturity... And, as the initial work of a man of 27, it is a harbinger of a literary force of whose incalculable future I believe no reader of this book will be in doubt."One wonders what Hemmingway and Faulkner thought of this!Though Cane survived only two small printings (1923 and 1927) while Toomer was alive, William Stanley Braithewaite, a black critic, exclaimed"Jean Toomer, ...artist of the race, ...can write about the Negro without the surrender or the compromise of the artist's vision.... He would write just as well ... about the peasants of Russia or ... Ireland, has experience given him the knowledge of their existence. Cane is a book of gold...and Jean Toomer is a bright morning star of a new day of the race in literature."Thus, Cane forecast, by several years, what is now called the Harlem Renaissance and inspired an entire generation of African American writers, beginning with his contemporaries Langston Hughes, Countee Cullen, and Zora Neal Hurston.In spite of Toomer's success with Cane , recent African American historians have given, at best, perhaps with misinterpretation, reluctant support of Toomer. Toni Morrison writes, of Toomer and Cane,"In spite of Jean Toomer's yearning for racelessness, his horror of 'dark blood,' what is astonishing is how eloquent he was about the drop that bedeviled him: how moving he was about those who shared it. What wo...
