AUTHOR BIOGRAPHYJean Toomer was born Nathan Pinchback
Toomer on December 26, 1894, in Washington,
D.C. He was the grandson of P. B. S. Pinchback,
who served as acting lieutenant governor and
then acting governor of Louisiana in the 1870s,
andgrewupinanaffluentWashingtonneighbor-
hood, mostly in his grandfather’s house after his
father, Nathan Toomer, abandoned the family.
When the young Toomer was eleven, his mother
remarried, and he moved with her and his new
stepfather to New York. When she died of appen-
dicitis in 1909, he moved back to Washington to
live with his grandfather again, but this time in a
less affluent, African American neighborhood.
Before this time, according to his unpublished
autobiographical writings as reported on in John
Chandler Griffin’sBiography of American Author
Jean Toomer, 1894–1967, Toomer had thought of
himself as white, but he now became more aware
of his black heritage. His grandfather had always
claimed African ancestry, though Toomer would
later suggest that he did so mainly for political
advantage during the Reconstruction era, when
being African American was helpful in winning
political office. While Toomer’s father claimed to
be a wealthy Georgia plantation owner, he, too,
may have had African blood.
Toomer’s racial status is sometimes referred
to as an ‘‘enigma,’’ as Griffin puts it. In his early
years as a writer, he became interested in the
situation of African Americans and took a job
at a school in Georgia, which helped inspire him
to write the poems and stories about African
Americans that went intoCane.WhenCanewas
published in 1923, Toomer was hailed as an up-
and-coming black writer. Toomer’s publisher,
Boni and Liveright, wanted to promote his work
as that of an African American. Toomer, how-
ever, resisted, and in later years he distanced him-
self from the African American situation and, in a
pamphlet quoted by Brian Joseph Benson and
Mabel Mayle Dillard in their book on Toomer,
said that his race was neither white nor black but
American.
The successful portion of Toomer’s writing
career proved brief. He took up writing around
1920 after attending a number of colleges and
universities around the country, studying agricul-
ture,sociology,history,andpsychology,butwith-
out ever taking a degree. He held a number of
temporary jobs doing manual labor and office
work, as well as selling cars, but eventually became
associated with New York literary and intellectual
circles, meeting writers and editors. Encourage-
ment from these contacts, combined with inspira-
tion provided by two trips to the South, led to an
outpouring of literary works that he first pub-
lished in various magazines and then gathered
together in 1923 inCane. ‘‘Storm Ending’’ (1922)
was one of the poems published first in a literary
magazine and then inCane.Scholarsdifferon
when exactly it was written; Benson and Dillard
include it among the works inspired by Toomer’s
trip to Georgia in 1921, whereas Wolfgang Karrer,
in his article inJean Toomer and the Harlem Ren-
aissance, says it was part of the manuscripts he
produced before that time.
After 1923, Toomer published little. He not
only distanced himself from the African American
subject matter that had made him successful but
also became caught up in the mystical spiritual
movement led by George Gurdjieff, which led him
to believe that writing was much less important
than personal enlightenment. He did continue to
write, but after his conversion to Gurdjieffian
beliefs, his works became thinly veiled presentationsJean Toomer(ÓBettmann / Corbis)
Storm Ending