"Mark Whalen's compilation offers a vital document for understanding the contexts, intellectual debates, and tensions undergirding Toomer's work, including his simultaneous feelings of attraction to and estrangement from rural southern life, the influence of technology on race and urban existence in America and the contradictory pulls of folk culture and modernist experimentation. The collection also charts the motives underlying Toomer's abandonment of the style that distinguished Cane, and his growing fascination with the teachings of the mystic G. I. Gurdjieff in 1924."--BOOK JACKET.