Jean Toomer's Years with Gurdjieff: Portrait of an Artist, 1923-1936

Jean Toomer (1894-1967) earned his place in American literary history with Cane (1923), a brilliant modernist collage of fiction, poetry, and drama about black life in rural Georgia and the urban North. Although Toomer continued to write prodigiously, his work went largely unpublished as he turned away from an exploration of his African American roots he had employed so powerfully in Cane. Rudolph P. Byrd examines the central reason behind Toomer's literary decline: his enthusiasm for the theories of George Gurdjieff, a contemporary Russian psychologist, philosopher, and mystic. As Toomer's work degenerated into propaganda for Gurdjieff's theories on human development and spiritual reforms, publishers turned away. Yet, Byrd makes clear that the works Toomer wrote after 1923 do not represent the total break from his earlier concerns that critics have generally assumed. Examining both Cane and the body of writings Toomer produced after it, Byrd finds a distinct thematic unity in the Toomer canon--a consistent, optimistic faith in human possibility and wholeness.

Author: Rudolph P. Byrd
Publisher: University of Georgia Press
Published: 08/01/2010
Pages: 232
Binding Type: Paperback
Weight: 0.76lbs
Size: 9.00h x 6.00w x 0.53d
ISBN13: 9780820337777
ISBN10: 0820337773
BISAC Categories:
- Social Science | Ethnic Studies | American | African American & Black Studies
- Literary Criticism | American | African American & Black

About the Author
RUDOLPH P. BYRD (1953-2011) was a professor of African American Literature and director of African American Studies, Emory University.