Then in 1951,
cane was republished, and by 1969 it had made a dramatic comeback from obscurity. A new generation of thinkers confirmed earlier appraisals of Toomer's book, hailing
cane for its critical achievement as well as for its intrinsic worth as the first major book to affirm cultural assumptions of the Harlem Renaissance of the 1920s.
Nathan Eugene Toomer, the son of Nina Pinchback and Georgia planter Nathan Toomer, was born in Washington, D.C., on 26 December 1894. Although known by the surname Pinchback for most of his early life, he used his father's last name as an adult, and when he began to write, he changed Eugene to Jean. He spent his early years in Washington in the home of his maternal grandparents to which his mother had returned after her husband deserted her in 1895. Toomer's grandfather Pinckney Benton Stewart Pinchback had been a powerful politician associated with the Louisiana governor's office in the era of Reconstruction. The Pinchbacks were a racially mixed family. In the autobiographical essay "On Being An American," Toomer described his background as "Scotch, Welsh, German, English, French, Dutch, Spanish, with some dark blood." Although the Pinchbacks were sufficiently fair-skinned to have been considered white, P.
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