1. Jean Toomer resisted being classified as a "Negro" writer and he identified as "American".
41 Facts About Jean Toomer
1. 2.
Jean Toomer's papers are held by the Beinecke Rare Book Library at Yale University.
3.
Jean Toomer's father was born into slavery in Chatham County, North Carolina and was later sold with members of his family to John Toomer, in Houston County, Georgia, in the 1850s.
4.
Jean Toomer later took his former enslaver's surname, "Toomer", after emancipation.
5.
Jean Toomer's father was suspicious of Nathan Toomer and strongly opposed his daughter's choice for marriage, but he ultimately acquiesced.
6.
Jean Toomer received a variety of nicknames by various family members.
7.
Jean Toomer returned to DC after his mother's death in 1909, when he was 15, and he lived with his maternal grandparents.
8.
Jean Toomer graduated from the M Street High School, a prestigious academic black high school in the city with a national reputation.
9.
When "Jean Toomer" registered for the World War II draft in 1942, he was identified as Negro.
10.
Between 1914 and 1917, Jean Toomer attended six institutions of higher education, studying agriculture, fitness, biology, sociology, and history, but he never completed a degree.
11.
Jean Toomer published some short stories and continued writing during the volatile social period following World War I Jean Toomer worked for some months in a shipyard in 1919, then escaped to middle-class life.
12.
Jean Toomer devoted eight months to the study of Eastern philosophies and continued to be interested in this subject.
13.
Jean Toomer's work drew from the socialist and "New Negro" movements of New York.
14.
Jean Toomer read new American writing, such as Waldo Frank's Our America.
15.
Jean Toomer gained experience in both white and "colored" societies, and resisted being classified as a "Negro" writer.
16.
Jean Toomer grudgingly allowed his publisher of Cane to use that term to increase sales, as there was considerable interest in new black writers.
17.
Jean Toomer always claimed that he was a representative of a new, emergent race that was a combination of various races.
18.
In 1921, Jean Toomer took a job for a few months as a principal at a new rural agricultural and manual labor college for black people in Sparta, Georgia.
19.
Jean Toomer returned to New York, where he became friends with Waldo Frank.
20.
Jean Toomer was the first poet to unite folk culture and the elite culture of the white avant-garde.
21.
Jean Toomer acknowledged the influence of Sherwood Anderson's Winesburg, Ohio as his model, in addition to other influential works of that period.
22.
However, as previously stated, Jean Toomer resisted racial classification and did not want to be marketed as a "Negro" writer.
23.
That year, and in 1926 and 1927, Jean Toomer went to France for periods of study with Gurdjieff, who had settled at Fontainebleau.
24.
Jean Toomer was a student of Gurdjieff until the mid-1930s.
25.
Jean Toomer continued with his spiritual exploration by traveling to India in 1939.
26.
Jean Toomer wrote a small amount of fiction in this later period.
27.
Jean Toomer devoted most of his time to serving on Quaker committees for community service and working with high school students.
28.
Jean Toomer continued to write privately including several autobiographies and a poetry volume titled, The Wayward and the Seeking.
29.
Jean Toomer died in 1967 after several years of poor health.
30.
Jean Toomer was criticized violently by some for marrying a white woman.
31.
Jean Toomer named their only daughter Margery in his wife's memory.
32.
In 1934, the widowed Jean Toomer married a second time, to Marjorie Content, a New York photographer.
33.
Jean Toomer was the daughter of Harry and Ada Content, a wealthy German-Jewish family.
34.
Jean Toomer wrote extensively from 1935 to 1940 about relationships between the genders, influenced by his Gurdjieff studies, as well as Jungian psychology.
35.
Jean Toomer had fundamentally traditional views about men and women, which he put in symbolic terms.
36.
In 1939, Toomer changed his name again, using "Nathan Jean Toomer", to emphasize that he was male.
37.
Jean Toomer usually signed his name N Jean Toomer, and continued to be called "Jean" by friends.
38.
Jean Toomer resisted being classified as a "Negro writer", but his most enduring work, Cane was inspired by his time in the rural, African-American South, being an imaginative exploration of the African-American world inspired by that heritage.
39.
Jean Toomer twice had been classified as "Negro", in draft registrations: in 1917 and, later, in 1942.
40.
When Jean Toomer married Margery Latimer, a white woman, in Wisconsin in 1931, the license noted both as white.
41.
Jean Toomer said that they were working to find a voice for themselves.