Volume 28, Number 3 · March 5, 1981
Phantom
By Darryl Pinckney
The Wayward and the Seeking: A Collection of Writings by Jean Toomer
edited by Darwin T. Turner
Howard University Press, 450 pp., $14.95
Jean Toomer is a phantom of the Harlem Renaissance. Pick up any general study of the literature written by Afro-Americans and there is the name of Jean Toomer. In biographies and memoirs of Harlem Renaissance figures, his name is invoked as if he had been one of the sights along Lenox Avenue. Toomer's name appears in unexpected places too—among the editors and contributors of New Masses (May 1926); in America & Alfred Stieglitz (1934); in a recent biography of Georgia O'Keeffe. He is present in the letters of the young Hart Crane. Toomer, who sometimes denied he was a Negro, belongs as much to the downtown avant-garde scene of the Twenties as he does to the Negro Awakening.
Review, 3899 words
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