A literary masterpiece of the Harlem Renaissance, Cane is a powerful work of innovative fiction evoking black life in the South. The sketches, poems, and stories of black rura! and urban life that make up Cane are rich in imagery. Visions of smoke, sugarcane, dusk, and flame permeate the Southern landscape: the Northern world is pictured as a harsher reality of asphalt streets. Impressionistic, sometimes surrealistic, the pieces are redolent of naturę and Africa, with sensuous appeals to eye and ear.

"By far the most impressive product of the Negro Renaissance, Cane ranks with Richard Wrights Native Son and Ralph Ellison's lnvisible Man as a measure of the Negro novelist's highest achievement. Jean Toomer belongs to that first rank of writers who use words almost as a plastic medium, shaping new meanings from an original and highly personal style." — Robert A. Bonę, The Negro Novel in America America

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Cover painting by Romare Bearden: Sunset Limited (1978)
Introduction by Darwin T. Turner, University of Iowa
First published in 1923 by Boni & Liveright