Brother mine : the correspondence of Jean Toomer and Waldo Frank / Kathleen Pfeiffer, Jean Toomer, and Waldo Frank.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Pfeiffer, Kathleen, 1964- author.

Toomer, Jean, 1894-1967, author.

Frank, Waldo David, 1889-1967, author.

Series:

Book collections on Project MUSE

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Toomer, Jean, 1894-1967--Correspondence.

Toomer, Jean.

Frank, Waldo David, 1889-1967--Correspondence.

Frank, Waldo David.

African American authors--Correspondence.

African American authors.

Authors, American--20th century--Correspondence.

Authors, American.

Physical Description:

1 online resource (262 pages)

Edition:

First edition.

Place of Publication:

Urbana : University of Illinois Press, [2010]

Summary:

The friendship of Jean Toomer and Waldo Frank was one of the most emotionally intense, racially complicated, and aesthetically significant relationships in the history of American literary modernism. Waldo Frank was an established white writer who advised and assisted the younger African American Jean Toomer as he pursued a literary career. They met in 1920, began corresponding regularly in 1922, and were estranged by the end of 1923, the same year that Toomer published his ambitiously modernist debut novel, Cane. While individual letters between Frank and Toomer have been published separately on occasion, they have always been presented out of context. This volume presents for the first time their entire correspondence in chronological order, comprising 121 letters ranging from 200 to 800 words each. Kathleen Pfeiffer annotates and introduces the letters, framing the correspondence and explaining the literary and historical allusions in the letters themselves. Reading like an epistolary novel, Brother Mine captures the sheer emotional force of the story that unfolds in these letters: two men discover an extraordinary friendship, and their intellectual and emotional intimacy takes shape before our eyes. This unprecedented collection preserves the raw honesty of their exchanges, together with the developing drama of their ambition, their disappointments, their assessment of their world, and ultimately, the betrayal that ended the friendship.

Contents:

Introduction

Toomer and Frank meet

Regular correspondence begins

Publication and estrangement

The aftermath

Appendixes.

Notes:

Includes bibliographical references and index.

Description based on publisher supplied metadata and other sources.

Description based on print version record.

ISBN:

0-252-05612-4