Jean Toomer has 4 audiobooks on Listento.it, narrated by 6 narrators, with an average listener rating of 4★ across 6 ratings. The most-rated is Cane.
Cane
Summary
The Harlem Renaissance writer's innovative and groundbreaking novel depicting African American life in the South and North, with a foreword by National Book Foundation 5 Under 35 honoree Zinzi Clemmons.... Jean Toomer's Cane is one of the most significant works to come out of the Harlem Renaissance, and is considered to be a masterpiece in American modernist literature because of its distinct structure and style. First published in 1923 and told through a series of vignettes, Cane uses poetry, prose, and play-like dialogue to create a window into the varied lives of African Americans living in the rural South and urban North during a time when Jim Crow laws pervaded and racism reigned. While critically acclaimed and known today as a pioneering text of the Harlem Renaissance, the book did not gain as much popularity as other works written during the period. Fellow Harlem Renaissance writer Langston Hughes believed Cane's lack of a wider readership was because it didn't reinforce the stereotypes often associated with African Americans during the time, but portrayed them in an accurate and entirely human way, breaking the mold and laying the groundwork for how African Americans are depicted in literature.
©2019 Foreword: Zinzi Clemmons (P)2019 Blackstone Audio, Inc.
Cane
Summary
Poet Jean Toomer’s short-story and poetry collection.
Public Domain (P)2019 Deaver Brown
Cane
Summary
First published in 1923, Jean Toomer's Cane is an innovative literary work powerfully evoking black life in the South. Rich in imagery, Toomer's impressionistic, sometimes surrealistic sketches of Southern rural and urban life are permeated by visions of smoke, sugarcane, dusk, and fire; the northern world is pictured as a harsher reality of asphalt streets. This iconic work of American literature is published with a new afterword by Rudolph Byrd of Emory University and Henry Louis Gates Jr. of Harvard University, who provide groundbreaking biographical information on Toomer, place his writing within the context of American modernism and the Harlem Renaissance, and examine his shifting claims about his own race and his pioneering critique of race as a scientific or biological concept.
©1923 Boni & Liveright, renewed 1951 Jean Toomer; Afterword © 2011 Rudolph P. Byrd and Henry Louis Gates, Jr., reprinted from Cane: Authoritive Text, Contexts, Criticism; "Toomer" by Elizabeth Alexander, © 2010 Elizabeth Alexander (P)2013 Dreamscape Media, LLC
Cane (AmazonClassics Edition)
Summary
A striking mosaic of prose, poetry, and dramatic dialogue, Jean Toomer’s Cane has come to be considered a masterpiece of the Harlem Renaissance. Structured as a series of vignettes ripe with longing, passion, violence, and revenge, the haunting novel gives a powerful voice to the interior lives of African Americans in the rural South and urban North.
Championed for its unsparing honesty and psychological insight by such luminaries as Langston Hughes, Richard Wright, Alice Walker, and Maya Angelou, Cane shines as a beacon to generations of African-American writers who followed.
Revised edition: Previously published as Cane, this edition of Cane (AmazonClassics Edition) includes editorial revisions.
Public Domain (P)2019 Brilliance Publishing, Inc., all rights reserved.