Virginia Hamilton
March 12, 1936 - February 19, 2002

Virginia Hamilton, together with two brothers and two sisters, grew up on a large farm in Yellow Springs, Ohio. Her mother was Etta Belle.  Her father was Kenneth James Hamilton, the manager of the dining hall at nearby Antioch College and a farmer. The farm was large and was surrounded by the farms of other relatives. She has said that you could "range a whole day and never leave family land". She has lived in Columbus, Ohio, and New York City but she now lives back in Yellow Springs on a small piece of that farm with her husband Arnold Adoff, the poet and children's author. They have two children, Leigh and Jaime.

  Virginia was  named for her grandfather's home state. "My mother said that her father sat his ten children down every year and said, 'I'm going to tell you how I escaped from slavery, so slavery will never happen to you,"' the author related in a telephone interview. She added that she traces her own interest in literature to the fact that her parents were "storytellers and unusually fine storytellers, and realized, although I don't know how consciously, that they were passing along heritage and culture and a pride in their history."

   Virginia  knew from a very early age that she wanted to tell stories too. On her way to becoming a writer, she lived in New York City and worked as an accountant, a nightclub singer, and a museum receptionist, among many other jobs. Then she published her first book, Zeely, about her own roots in rural America, and soon afterward she and her family moved back to Yellow Springs.
   Hamilton wrote many different types of books, including mysteries, science fiction, and history. Whatever she wrote about, she said, what's most important is telling a good story — just as her parents did.

 In 1963, her daughter Leigh was born; her son, Jaime Levi, followed in 1967. That same year, she published her first book, Zeely. She and her family moved back to Yellow Springs shortly afterwards.
    Zeely is the story of the young girl in rural America who fantasizes that a tall majestic young woman in her town is an African queen, only find out that she actually is. "It was one of the very first books where black characters are simply being people and living; it's not a 'problem' book about integration," Hamilton said. As a result, Zeely attracted considerable attention. This was, after all, the era of racial strife across the country, mixed with a rising credo of "black is beautiful." The time was right, and besides, editors at the MacMillan publishing house were suitably impressed by the short story from which the book evolved; Hamilton had been lucky enough to have a friend working at MacMillan who pushed for the the editors to pay Hamilton attention.

When Virginia Hamilton died on February 19, 2002 the world of children's literature suffered a great loss. She was, as The New York Times said,   "an internationally recognized writer for children whose work celebrated the African American experience as an essential component of American life."

E. E. Cummings
October 14, 1894 - September 3, 1962

Edward Estlin Cummings was born October 14 in Cambridge, MA the son of Edward and Rebecca Clarke Cummings. His energetic, versatile, and highly articulate father  was the first professor of Sociology at Harvard University also taught and political science there in the 1890's and in 1900 was ordained minister of the South Congregational Church, Unitarian, in Boston. The Irving Street household will include at various times Grandmother Cummings, Aunt Jane, EEC's maternal uncle, George Clarke, and younger sister Elizabeth. Cummings attended Cambridge public schools spent his vacations in Maine and at the family summer home in Silver Lake, NH

His mother taught him  to write poems. Edward was only 12 when he entered high school. He went on to attend Harvard where  he earned  a B.A. and M.A and graduated Magna cum Laude. His first poems were published in the Harvard Monthly.

Cummings went to France in 1917 as a volunteer for the Norton-Harjes Ambulance Corps in the First World War. However, due to an organizational mix-up, Cummings was not assigned to his unit for five weeks, during which time he stayed in Paris. Cummings became enamored with the city, which he would return to throughout his life. Cummings was eventually assigned to an ambulance unit though, after five months, he and a friend were arrested on  suspicion of espionage.  They were sent to a detention camp, the Dépôt de Triage, in La Ferté-Macé, Orne, Normandy for 3½ months. Cummings' experiences in the camp were later related in his novel The Enormous Room.

He was released from the camp on December 19, 1917, after much intervention from his father. Cummings returned to the United States on New Year's Day 1918. Later in 1918, he was drafted into the army. He served in the 73rd Infantry Division at Camp Devens, MA.

In 1926, Cummings' father, whom he was close to, and who was one of Cummings' most ardent supporters, was killed suddenly and tragically in a car accident. Though severely injured, Cummings' mother survived, and lived for more than twenty years until her death in 1947. Cummings detailed the accident in the following quote, from Richard S. Kennedy's biography of Cummings, Dreams in the Mirror:

Cummings married his second wife, Anne Minnerly Barton, in 1929.  The two separated three years later. In that same year Cummings met Marion Morehouse, a fashion model and photographer. Although it is not clear if the two were ever officially married, Morehouse would live with Cummings for the remainder of his life, and is considered to have been at the least his common-law wife.

Cummings often had an unusual flair for experimenting with the English language. Not only would he paint pictures with words, but he would move the actual words into specific positions to also tell a story within the placement. His use of grammar, form, and syntax often broke the rules of tradition.

His name is frequently written in lowercase, e. e. cummings, as the lowercase form was a concept for a cover design by one of his publishers. However, Cummings himself capitalized his name. Stories claiming that Cummings preferred a lowercase version of his name or even so much legally changed his name to the lowercase version are false.

On September 3, 1962, Cummings died as a result of a cerebral hemorrhage.

Lorraine Hansberry
1930 - 1965

"I was born black and female," Lorraine Hansberry said. These twin identities would dominate her life and her work. Rejecting the limits placed on her race and her gender, she used her writing and her life  to expand the meaning of what it meant to be a black woman.

Lorraine Hansberry was born in Chicago, the daughter of a prominent real-estate broker, Carl Hansberry, and the niece of William Leo Hansberry, a Howard University professor of African history.  Hansberry's parents were intellectuals and activists. Her father was an active member of the Republican Party. He won an antisegregation case before the Illinois Supreme Court, upon which the events in A Raisin in the Sun was loosely based. When Lorraine was eight, her parents bought a house in a white neighborhood, where they were welcomed one night by a racist mob. Their experience of discrimination there led to a civil rights case.

Hansberry attended the University of Wisconsin but left in 1950 to live in New York. She became a reporter for Freedom, a progressive Black newspaper.

Hansberry is best known for her play, A Raisin in the Sun, which was made into a motion picture shortly after she wrote it in 1959. Raisin created a splash in the African American literature of the time.  Her plays dealt with the lives of Black Americans in a white society and the complex issues that surrounded culture and race.

During her career as a playwright, Hansberry also wrote many articles and essays on racism, world peace and other social and political issues. She quickly became a central female figure within African American literature.

Hansberry's early death  in 1965 shocked the New York scene of artists and the future Black Arts Movement supporters. Len Holt wrote a tribute to Hansberry after her death which was published in Liberator Magazine:

Emily Dickinson

Emily Dickinson was born in Amherst, Massachusetts on December 10, 1830.  There she spent most of her life in the family home that was built in 1813 by her grandfather, Samuel Fowler Dickinson. His role in founding the Amherst Academy in 1814 and Amherst College in 1821 began a tradition of public service continued by her father, Edward, and her brother, Austin.

She had one older brother, William Austin and one younger sister, Lavina. Emily's father, Edward, was a prominent attorney in Amherst. Her mother, Emily, was very active in the Amherst community and best known for her cooking.

From 1847 through 1848 she spent studying under Mary Lyons at Mount Holyoke Female Seminary, Dickinson acquired limited notoriety as the one student unwilling to publicly confess faith in Christ. Designated a person with "no hope" of salvation, she keenly felt her isolation, writing her friend Abiah Root in 1848, "I am not happy, and I regret that last term, when that golden opportunity was mine, that I did not give up and become a Christian." In 1850, she would share similar sentiments with her friend Jane Humphrey: "Christ is calling everyone here, all my companions have answered, even my darling Vinnie believes she loves, and trusts him, and I am standing alone in rebellion."
 
Such resistance to conversion at a time when friends and family were making public confessions reflects a lifelong willingness to oppose popular sentiment. The experience at Mount Holyoke may well have brought to the surface an independence that fueled Dickinson's writing and led her to cease attending church by the time she was thirty. Following her return to Amherst in 1848 and after the religious awakening that peaked there around 1850, she began to write seriously.
 

After attending Mt. Holyoke seminary for only 7 months, Emily returned  home and began to write poetry. She wrote most of her poems from 1858 to 1865 and collected them into small packets (fascicles). After Emily's father died in 1874, she rarely ventured out of her home, keeping in touch with family and friends with cards and letters. She attended to her extravagant gardens, baked for the family and helped her sister Lavina take care of her ailing mother. Emily and Lavina lived at home, unmarried, until Emily's death in May of 1886.

 George Orwell

English novelist, essayist and critic, famous for his political satires Animal Farm(1945),  and Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949)the British author George Orwell, pen name of Eric Arthur Blair was born in Motihari, India, June 25, 1903.

His father, Richard Walmesley Blair was a civil servant for the British government. In 1904 Orwell moved with his mother and sister to England where he remained until 1922. He began to write at an early age, and was even published in college periodicals, but he did not enjoy school.

Orwell failed to win a university scholarship and without the opportunity to continue his education he went to Burma and served in the administration of the Indian Imperial Police from 1922 to 1927 when he resigned in part due to his growing dislike of British imperialism, a dislike he vocalized in his essays.

After a period doing a variety of jobs in France he returned to England where opened a village shop. Using the pseudonym, George Orwell, he began writing articles for magazines. His first book, Down and Out in Paris and London (1933) described his experiences as a struggling writer. This book was followed by three novels, Burmese Days (1934), A Clergyman's Daughter (1935) and Keep the Aspidistra Flying (1936).

In 1936 Orwell was commissioned by Victor Gollancz to produce a documentary account of unemployment in the north of England for his Left Book Club. The Road to Wigan Pier established Orwell as one of Britain's leading writers and marked a high point in literary journalism.

Orwell, a committed socialist, went to Spain in December 1936 to report on the Spanish Civil War. He soon decided to join the struggle against the Nationalist Army and became a member of the Lenin Division in Barcelona, a unit under the control of the Workers Party of Marxist Unification. He was wounded, and, when the Communists attempted to eliminate their allies on the far left, fought against them and was forced to flee for his life.

In January 1937 Orwell, given the rank of corporal, was sent to join the offensive at Aragón. The following month he was moved to Huesca. After 115 days at the frontline he was granted leave and he returned to Barcelona. While there he witnessed the May Riots.

Orwell returned to Huesca on 12th May. Promoted to second lieutenant, he commanded a unit of 30 men. Soon after arriving back at the front he was hit by a sniper's bullet which passed through his neck. As a result of the wound, Orwell's left side was paralyzed and he temporarily lost his voice.

While in hospital Orwell heard that the Workers Party of Marxist Unification had been declared an illegal organization. Orwell was now in danger of being murdered by communists in the Republican Army. With the help of the British Consul in Barcelona, Orwell was able to escape to France.

During the second World War Orwell served as a sergeant in the Home Guard and also worked as a journalist for the BBC, Observer and Tribune, where he was literary editor from 1943 to 1945. It was toward the end of the war that he wrote Animal Farm, and when it was over he moved to Scotland.

It was Animal Farm that made finally Orwell prosperous. His other world wide success was Nineteen Eighty-Four, which Orwell said was written "to alter other people's idea of the kind of society they should strive after." Sadly Orwell never lived to see how successful it would become.

Eileen O'Shaugnessy, Orwell's wife died in 1945 and in 1949 he remarried to a woman named Sonia Browell. Orwell's second marriage was short-lived however, as he died from tuberculosis in London on January 21, 1950.

Pat Mora 

Pat Mora was born on January 19, 1942, in El Paso, Texas, but grew up speaking mostly Spanish at home, with the influence of her four grandparents who had come to Texas from Mexico in the early part of the century.Ý Mora received her B.A. in 1963 from Texas Western College and her M.A. from the University of Texas at El Paso in 1967. Mora held teaching positions at the secondary and college levels. She was also the host of a radio show called "Voices: The Mexican-American in Perspective."Ý After her divorce in 1981, Mora left teaching and went on to write children's books and poetry, working diligently to maintain the pride and respect she felt should be invested into the preservation of Mexican-American literature.

Mora is the recipient of numerous awards, some of which include the Creative Writing Award from the National Association for Chicano Studies in 1983; Women Artists and Writers of the Southwest poetry award, 1984. She also received Southwest Book Awards from Border Regional Library for her collections of poetry--in 1985, for Chants, and in 1987, for Borders. In 1988, she was named to the El Paso Herald-Post Writers Hall of Fame.

In 1997, Pat Mora and her illustrator, Raul Colon, received the third annual Tomas Rivera Mexican American Children's Book Award for their book Tomas and the Library Lady.Ý The significance of the award is to honor and celebrate the authors and illustrators of books that exemplify the lives of Mexican-Americans in the Southwest.

Pat Mora has also been recognized for her activist stance when it comes to her determination to bring about the existence of a national day, set for April 30th, to be designated as Dia de Los Ninos, Dia de Los Libros (Children's Day, Book Day), to celebrate language and bilingual literacy.Ý Mora's efforts and successes have spurred the enthusiasm of institutions towards celebrating the diversity and the value of language and how it unites us through literature.

Few women can claim Pat Mora's diversity in writing.Ý Catering to different audiences (children as well as adults), Mora's spare but evocative language spans several genres (poetry, fiction, and nonfiction) and two languages (English meshed with Spanish words and phrases). Pat Mora has received critical acclaim for her works that portray the cultural diversity and visual beauty of the Southwest as well as the theme of identity, especially that of woman and her connection with the various forms of the "earth mother."

Walter Dean Myers

 Walter Milton Myers was born in Martinsburg, West Virginia in 1937. After his mother died when he was only two, his father, unable to care for him, placed him in foster care.  With these parents, Florence and Herbert Dean, Walter moved to Harlem. The Deans were good to Myers, and as an adult he took their last name as his own middle name, to honor them. He  remembers a happy but tumultuous life while going through his own teen years. Suffering with a speech impediment, he cultivated a habit of writing poetry and short stories and acquired an early love of reading.

In 1954 he quit high school and joined the army. He later held many positions with various agencies including the New York State Department of Labor, the post office, a rehabilitation center and a transformer company. All during this time, Mr. Myers was writing for various magazines and periodicals. The turning point in his career came when he won a contest run by the Council on Interracial Books for Children with his book Where Does a Day Go? in 1969. Since then he has supported himself, his second wife, and four children with his very prolific writing in the area of children's and young adult literature. He volunteers at schools in Jersey City where is presently lives. He received his degree from Empire State College in 1984.

Myers explains his feeling for the young adult novel, "The special place of the young adult novel should be in its ability to address the needs of the reader to understand his or her relationships with the world, with each other, and with adults. The young adult novel often allows the reader to directly identify with a protagonist of similar interests and development." He is a compassionate, introspective person who believes, "It is this language of values which I hope to bring to my books. . . . I want to bring values to those who have not been valued, and I want to etch those values in terms of the ideal. Young people need ideals which identify them, and their lives, as central . . . guideposts which tell them what they can be, should be, and indeed are."

Following his success with young adult literature, Meyer has branched out to include topics of nonfiction including black history with his recent Now Is Your Time! and The Righteous Revenge of Artemis Bonner an 1880's historical setting. Both have been received with much acclaim.

Amy Tan

Amy Tan was born in Oakland, California. Her family lived in several communities in Northern California before settling in Santa Clara. Both of her parents were Chinese immigrants.

Her father, John Tan, was an electrical engineer and Baptist minister who came to America to escape the turmoil of the Chinese Civil War. The harrowing early life of her mother, Daisy, inspired Amy Tan's novel The Kitchen God's Wife. In China, Daisy had divorced an abusive husband but lost custody of her three daughters. She was forced to leave them behind when she escaped on the last boat to leave Shanghai before the Communist takeover in 1949. Her marriage to John Tan produced three children, Amy and her two brothers.

Tragedy struck the Tan family when Amy's father and oldest brother both died of brain tumors within a year of each other. Mrs. Tan moved her surviving children to Switzerland, where Amy finished high school, but by this time mother and daughter were in constant conflict.

Mother and daughter did not speak for six months after Amy Tan left the Baptist college her mother had selected for her to follow her boyfriend to San Jose City College. Tan further defied her mother by abandoning the pre-med course her mother had urged to pursue the study of English and linguistics. She received her bachelor's and master's degrees in these fields at San Jose State University. In 1974, she and her boyfriend, Louis DeMattei were married. They were later to settle in San Francisco.

DeMattei, an attorney, took up the practice of tax law, while Tan studied for a doctorate in linguistics, first at the University of California at Santa Cruz, later at Berkeley. By this time, she had developed an interest in the problems of the developmentally disabled. She left the doctoral program in 1976 and took a job as a language development consultant to the Alameda County Association for Retarded Citizens and later directed a training project for developmentally disabled children.

 With a partner, she started a business writing firm, providing speeches for salesmen and executives for large corporations. After a dispute with her partner, who believed she should give up writing to concentrate on the management side of the business, she became a full-time freelance writer. Among her business works, written under non-Chinese-sounding pseudonyms, were a 26-chapter booklet called "Telecommunications and You," produced for IBM.

Amy Tan prospered as a business writer. After a few years in business for herself, she had saved enough money to buy a house for her mother. She and her husband lived well on their double income, but the harder Tan worked at her business, the more dissatisfied she became. The work had become a compulsive habit and she sought relief in creative efforts. She studied jazz piano, hoping to channel the musical training forced on her by her parents in childhood into a more personal expression. She also began to write fiction.

 Her first story "Endgame," won her admission to the Squaw Valley writer's workshop taught by novelist Oakley Hall. The story appeared in FM, literary magazine, and was reprinted in Seventeen. A literary agent, Sandra Dijkstra, was impressed enough with Tan's second story "Waiting Between the Trees," to take her on as a client. Dijkstra encouraged Tan to complete an entire volume of stories.

Just as she was embarking on this new career, Tan's mother fell ill. Amy Tan promised herself that if her mother recovered, she would take her to China, to see the daughter who had been left behind almost forty years before. Mrs. Tan regained her health and mother and daughter departed for China in 1987. The trip was a revelation for Tan. It gave her a new perspective on her often-difficult relationship with her mother, and inspired her to complete the book of stories she had promised her agent.

 On the basis of the completed chapters and a synopsis of the others, Dijkstra found a publisher for the book, now called The Joy Luck Club. With a $50,000 advance from G.P. Putnam's Sons, Tan quit business writing and finished her book in a little more than four months.

Upon its publication in 1989, Tan's book won enthusiastic reviews and spent eight months on the New York Times best-seller list. paperback rights sold for $1.23 million. The book has been translated in 17 languages, including Chinese. Her subsequent novel, The Kitchen God's Wife (1991) confirmed her reputation and enjoyed excellent sales. Since then Amy Tan has published two books for children, The Moon Lady and The Chinese Siamese Cat and two novels The Hundred Secret Senses (1998) and her latest, The Bonesetter's Daughter (2001).

Maya Angelou

Internationally respected poet, writer and educator, Maya Angelou was born Marguerite Johnson on April 4, 1928 in  St. Louis, Missouri.  She spent her formative years shuttling between St. Louis, the tiny, totally segregated town of Stamps, Arkansas, and San Francisco where she realized her ambition of becoming that city's first black streetcar conductor.

In 1959, at the request of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., Maya Angelou became the northern coordinator for the Southern Christian Leadership Conference. From 1961 to 1962 she was associate editor of The Arab Observer in Cairo, Egypt, the only English-language news weekly in the Middle East, and from 1964 to 1966 she was feature editor of the African Review in Accra, Ghana. She returned to the U.S. in 1974 and was appointed by Gerald Ford to the Bicentennial Commission and later by Jimmy Carter to the Commission for International Woman of the Year. She accepted a lifetime appointment in 1981 as Reynolds Professor of American Studies at Wake Forest University in Winston-Salem, North Carolina. In 1993, Angelou wrote and delivered a poem, "On The Pulse of the Morning," at the inauguration for President Bill Clinton at his request.

The first black woman director in Hollywood, Angelou has written, produced, directed, and starred in productions for stage, film, and television. In 1971, she wrote the original screenplay and musical score for the film Georgia, Georgia, and was both author and executive producer of a five-part television miniseries "Three Way Choice." She has also written and produced several prize-winning documentaries, including "Afro-Americans in the Arts," a PBS special for which she received the Golden Eagle Award. Maya Angelou was twice nominated for a Tony award for acting: once for her Broadway debut in Look Away (1973), and again for her performance in Roots (1977).

Jean Toomer
1894-1967

Jean Toomer  was born Nathan Pinchback Toomer in Washington, D.C., the son of Nathan Toomer, a planter, and Nina Pinchback, the daughter of Pinckney Benton Stewart Pinchback, governor of Louisiana during Reconstruction and the first U.S. governor of African-American descent. Like his parents, Toomer could easily pass for white, his heritage comprising several European and African bloodlines. Indeed, throughout his formative years until age eighteen, he lived alternately as white and as African American. In 1895 Nathan Toomer abandoned his family, forcing Nina and her son to live with her somewhat tyrannical father in Washington. P. B. S. Pinchback agreed to support them only under the condition that the boy’s name be changed.

 Though his name was not legally altered, his grandparents thereafter called him Eugene Pinchback; in school he was known as Eugene Pinchback Toomer. (Later when he began writing, he shortened his name to Jean Toomer.) According to Toomer's biographers Cynthia Kerman and Richard Eldridge, "For Jean to grow up in a house with a grandfather who had been the only black governor of any state in the Union ... could not help shaping the perceptions and attitudes of the fatherless boy." In Washington Toomer lived in a white neighborhood but attended the all-black Garnet Elementary School.

When his mother remarried in 1906, the family moved to New Rochelle, New York, where they lived in a white neighborhood and he attended an all-white school. Toomer returned to Washington in 1909, following the death of his mother, and attended the all-black Dunbar High School. After graduation in 1914, he renounced racial classifications and sought to live not as a member of any racial group but as an American.

For the next three Years Toomer studied agriculture, physical education, psychology, and literature at several colleges and universities, including the University of Wisconsin (1914-1915), the Massachusetts College of Agriculture (1915), the American College of Physical Training at Chicago (1916), the University of Chicago (1916), the City College of New York (1917), and New York University (1917), although he never took a degree. It was during these years, however, that he was preparing to be a writer, by attending off-campus lectures on naturalism, atheism, psychology, evolution and socialism and by reading numerous philosophical and literary works, such as those by William Shakespeare, George Santayana, Charles Baudelaire, William Blake, Sherwood Anderson, Leo Tolstoy, and all the major American poets, especially the imagists. In 1920 he met Waldo Frank, who introduced him to several literary circles and later wrote an extremely laudatory introduction to the first edition of Cane. Toomer eventually became friends with many literary critics and luminaries, including Hart Crane, Sherwood Anderson, Malcolm Cowley, and Alfred Stieglitz.

Between 1918 and 1923 Toomer wrote the short stories "Bona and Paul" and "Withered Skin of Berries," the plays Natalie Mann (1922) and Balo (1922), and many poems such as "Five Vignettes," "Skyline," "Poem in C," "Gum," "Banking Coal," and "The First American." The urtext for both "Brown River Smile" and The Blue Meridian, "The First American" was a lyrical expression of his racial and democratic idealism.

I wrote a poem called "The First American," the idea of which was that here in America we are in the process of forming a new race, that I was one of the first conscious members of this race ... I had seen the divisions, the separatisms and antagonisms ... [yet] a new type of man was arising in this country--not European, not African, not Asiatic--but American. And in this American I saw the divisions mended, the differences reconciled--saw that (1) we would in truth be a united people existing in the United States, saw that (2) we would in truth be once again members of a united human race. (Turner, ed., The Wayward and the Seeking, p. 121)

Formally introduced to the philosophy of idealism in 1920, for more, than eight months Toomer abandoned writing to study Eastern philosophy.

I came into contact with an entirely new body of ideas. Buddhist philosophy, the Eastern teachings, occultism, theosophy ... These ideas challenged and stimulated me. Despite my literary purpose, I was compelled to know something more about them ... and my religious nature, given a cruel blow by Clarence Darrow and naturalism, but not, as I found, destroyed by them--my religious nature which had been sleeping was vigorously aroused. (Turner, ed., p. 119)

As an idealist philosopher, Toomer proposed the power of the mind to reconcile and transcend the self and the world. "In life nothing is only physical," he maintained, "there is also the symbolical. White and Black. West and East. North and South. Light and Darkness. In general, the great contrasts. The pairs of opposites. And I, together with all other I's, am the reconciler" (Turner, ed., p. 54). Based on his studies in orientalism, Toomer formulated theories of being and consciousness, and when he returned to writing in 1921 he sought literary equivalents for his idealism.

Symbolist and imagist aesthetics provided those equivalents, derived from both French and American sources. Of the French symbolists Toomer's mentor was Baudelaire, whose Petits poémes en prose provided models for the prose poems and lyrical sketches in Cane; of the American symbolists it was Walt Whitman, whose democratic idealism and mystical conception of the self appealed to Toomer's idealist imagination. Symbolist idealism also figures prominently in his early fascination with imagism. In his attempts to fashion experience as a mystical moment of vision, and to create the immediacy and presentness of portraiture of literature, he found imagist aesthetics to be compatible with his own. "Their insistence on fresh vision and on the perfect clean economical line was just what I had been looking for. I began feeling that I had in my hands the tools for my own creation" (Turner, ed., p. 120). Imagist poetics thus provided for him the ideal medium to make the reader "see," almost in mystical fashion, the distilled essence of an insight or experience.

In September 1921 Toomer traveled to Sparta, Georgia, where for two months he served as interim principal of the Sparta Agricultural and Industrial Institute. Living as an African American in the rural South stimulated his racial consciousness, and he used this newly found identification with his racial past to create the poems, prose poems, lyrical narratives, and short stories in his lyrical novel and master-work, Cane (1923). While many critics have credited this work with ushering in the Harlem Renaissance, noting the book's representations of African-American characters and culture, others have located it within the Lost Generation, owing to its literary experimentation, its romantic primitivism, and its critiques of postwar values. Part one of the book presents portraits of six women of the rural South, in a style reminiscent of Sherwood Anderson's gallery of grosteques in Winesburg, Ohio (1919). Part two shifts to the urban North, using paysage moralisé settings in Washington, D.C., and Chicago to depict the modern world as a postwar wasteland. In Part three, "Kabnis," the setting shifts back to the rural South and dramatizes a portrait of an artist struggling to represent the parting soul of the African-American past in art. Robert Bone has noted that Toomer participated on equal terms with Gertrude Stein, Ernest Hemingway, Ezra Pound, and T S. Eliot in the creation of a new, modern idiom during the 1920s, and he ranks Cane with Richard Wright's Native Son (1940) and Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man (1952) in the tradition of the African-American novel.

Shortly after the publication of Cane, Toomer began studying the austere idealism of George Ivanovitch Gurdjieff, and in 1924, 1926, and 1927 he attended the Gurdjieff Institute for Harmonious Development at the Château de Prieuré in Fontainebleau, France. Until 1935, when he distanced himself from Gurdjieff, Toomer preached the gospel of higher consciousness and spiritual self-development. Yet he continued his profession as a writer. Indeed, the years between 1923 and 1935 were the most productive of Toomer's literary career.

In 1925 the symbolist sketch "Easter" was published in Little Review, and in 1927 Toomer completed a burlesque novel, The Gallonwerps, and a modern morality play, The Sacred Factory. In 1928 he wrote the short story "Skillful Dr. Coville" while "Winter on Earth," another short story, was published in The Second American Caravan and the short story "Mr. Costyve Duditch" in the Dial. In 1929 he collected ten of his stories in a volume titled "Lost and Dominant" (unpublished), while the poems "White Arrow" and "Reflections" appeared in the Dial. In that same year, "Lettre D' Amérique," an essay on the election of Herbert Hoover as president and its impact on American values, was published (in French) in Bifur while his essay "Race Problems and Modern Society" appeared in Problems of Civilization. Also in 1929 York Beach, his psychological novella set in Maine, was published in The New American Caravan. In 1931 Toomer completed his long poem The Blue Meridian, a lyrical affirmation of democratic idealism modeled after Whitman's "Song of Myself," and Essentials, a book of aphorisms.

Also in 1931 Toomer conducted his highly publicized Gurdjieffian "Cottage Experiment," a summer workshop in psychological and social development held in Portage, Wisconsin. During this workshop he met and married Margery Latimer, author of This Is My Body (1930) and Guardian Angel and Other Stories (1932). They lived in an artist colony in Carmel, California. Toomer recounts this time in their lives, and the adverse publicity surrounding their interracial marriage, in his unpublished novel "Caromb" (1932). In August 1932 Latimer died while giving birth to their daughter, Margery. During this year the poem "Brown River Smile" appeared in Pagany, and the poem "As the Eagle Soars" was published in the Crisis. In 1933 he wrote a closet drama on modernism and dehumanization, Man's Home Companion. In 1934 Toomer published an essay on spiritual development, "A New Force for Cooperation," in Adelphi and an essay tribute to Stieglitz titled "The Hill" in America and Alfred Stieglitz: A Collective Portrait. In 1934 he married Marjorie Content, daughter of a Wall Street banker, and they remained together until his death. Because both of Toomer's marriages were interracial, they were highly publicized.

In 1935 Toomer dissociated himself from Gurdjieff after they argued over misappropriated funds. He and his wife then spent the summer in Taos, New Mexico, where he wrote A Drama of the Southwest, a play that captures his mystical identification with the area's landscape in imagery reminiscent of Cane. Although he and Gurdjieff were estranged, Toomer never repudiated Gurdjieffian philosophy. When the Toomers moved to Doylestown, Pennsylvania, in 1936, he established a Gurdjieff center, led groups modeled on Gurdjieff's teachings, and gave lectures on spiritual self-development. During this time he published three monographs called "psychologic papers," Living Is Developing (1937), Work-Ideas I (1937), and Roads, People, and Principles (1939).

In 1938 Toomer began attending meetings of the Religious Society of Friends in Doylestown. Throughout his apprenticeship with this group, he immersed himself in Quaker religious philosophy and wrote numerous essays on George Fox and Quakerism. Still engaged in his perennial quest for new forms of higher consciousness, Toomer toured India between August and December 1939. During these months he began writing The Angel Begori, a novel that allegorizes a quest for spiritual enlightenment, and The Colombo-Madras Rail, a one-act play dramatizing poverty and the decline of spiritual authority in India. Near the end of his tour, however, he admitted that this new quest for spiritual enlightenment was unsuccessful. "A life of withdrawal from the world as I have seen it lived in India is not the life for me," he declared (Kerman and Eldridge, p. 245).

When Toomer returned to Doylestown in January 1940, believing that Quakerism provided a new and radical venture into the religious idealism of "Inner Light" consciousness, he joined the Society of Friends.

The message of Quakerism is that there is that of God in every man. Indeed the message is the immediacy of God ... Quakerism says here is a way to God. Here are practices that will lead you to discover God in yourself and your fellowman. Here are means and methods that enable you to recover the indwelling divinity and realize you are part of it ... Quakerism is not unique in proclaiming that something of God is in man. Hinduism proclaims the same ... [and] Catholic mystics made the same discovery. (Toomer, "The Message of Quakerism")

He quickly became involved in various Quaker activities, serving on four Friends committees in 1941 and as clerk of the ministry and counsel committee for Bucks County in 1943. In 1943 he was appointed to the ministry and counsel executive committee at the annual Friends conference in Philadelphia, and he served on the religious life committee in 1945. In recognition of his devotion to Quaker principles, Toomer was asked to give the William Penn Lecture in Philadelphia in 1949. Notwithstanding his new religious affiliation, he continued his devotion to Gurdjieffian idealism. Indeed, in 1942 he sought to reconcile Gurdjieffian and Quaker philosophy by organizing a cooperative, comprising both lay individuals interested in spiritual self-development and Quakers. Based in an old water-powered grist mill called "Mill House," where they all worked and lived, the members of this cooperative, "Friends of Being," dedicated themselves to overcoming separations of all kinds. One Mill House resident, Frank Davenport, recalled his experiences as follows:

At the center was Jean Toomer, a gentle man with force. He was the prime mover; from him came the ideas, principles, purposes, insights, understandings.... He opened doors we were