Cane, Jean Toomer, 1923 

This classic book from the Harlem Renaissance poet, novelist, and spiritualist N. Jean Toomer, is complex and difficult to understand.  Consisting of poems, short stories, and even a play, Toomer evokes the Georgia of the post-Civil War period and Washington, D.C.  Toomer’s own story of passing between the Black and white worlds of the inter-War period is fascinating.  Waldo Frank’s Foreward to the book identifies it as the ‘harbinger of a literary force of whose incalculable future I believe no reader will be in doubt,’ but unfortunately, Cane turned out to be Toomer’s only work of any note.