Gleeson Library’s Special Collections include more than 17,000 items including books, manuscripts, photographs, drawings, engravings, and other artworks. Here’s a peek at just one of those special items.
“Life bends joy and pain, beauty and ugliness, in such a way that no one may isolate them.” – Jean Toomer, Cane (1923)
Jean Toomer’s 1923 experimental novel Cane is a masterpiece of the Harlem Renaissance. Described as impressionistic, Cane contains a series of interlaced prose and verse vignettes that center the varied lives and experiences of African Americans in the United States in the early 20th century.
The library has a special edition of Jean Toomer’s novel printed by the Arion Press and containing woodcuts by the contemporary artist Martin Puryear. Puryear’s art and sculptures often explore themes related to Black history, and Puryear created these woodcuts specifically in response to the Black female characters whose stories are featured in Toomer’s novel.
Puryear has said this about his woodcuts: “I didn’t want to illustrate Cane in a direct way. The women are such strong characters, the real forces around which the action revolves.”
Gleeson Library’s copy of this book has a beige cloth binding with brown cloth ties. The book was designed by Andrew Hoyem and produced with his associates at the Arion Press in San Francisco. This book includes an afterword written by the historian Leon T. Litwack. [USF catalog record of Cane]
To get a closer look at this book or any Special Collections items, stop by the Donohue Rare Book Room on on the 3rd floor of Gleeson Library. You can also contact us to ask a question or schedule an appointment.
For more information about the author or artist:
Fabre, Geneviève & Feith, Michel, eds. Jean Toomer and the Harlem Renaissance. New Brunswick, N.J. : Rutgers University Press, 2001.
“Cane.” Literary Context: Novels, Translations, Drama & Essays. Literary Reference Center Plus, 2021.
“Reviewed Work: Cane by Jean Toomer, Martin Puryear” Art on Paper, Vol. 5, No. 3 (January-February 2001), p. 74.
Mulder, Karen L. 2016. “Presence in a Space The Flickering Contradictions of Martin Puryear.” Image: Art, Faith, Mystery, no. 91 (Winter): 23–35.