The novel intertwines the stories of six women and includes an apparently autobiographical thread; sociologist Charles S. Johnson called it "the most astonishingly brilliant beginning of any Negro writer of his generation".

After the death of his first wife, Nathan Sr. married Amanda America Dickson, a former enslaved woman of mixed race whose inheritance from her white father resulted in great wealth.

Her father was suspicious of Nathan Toomer and strongly opposed his daughter's choice for marriage, but he ultimately acquiesced.

Nina divorced him and took back her maiden name of Pinchback; she and her son returned to live with her parents in Washington D.C.

Angered by her husband's abandonment, Nina's father insisted that they use another name for her son and started calling him Eugene, after the boy's godfather.

After his mother remarried, they moved to suburban New Rochelle, New York, and the youth began to attend an all-white school.

His wide readings among prominent contemporary poets and writers, and the lectures that he attended during his college years, shaped the direction of his writing.

He grudgingly allowed his publisher of Cane to use that term to increase sales, as there was considerable interest in new black writers.

"[11]In 1921, 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.

The school was in the center of Hancock County and the Black Belt 100 miles southeast of Atlanta, near where his father had lived.

[4] Seeing the life of rural blacks, racial segregation, and virtual labor peonage in the Deep South led Toomer to identify more strongly as African American and with his father's past.

In 1908, the state had ratified a constitution that disenfranchised most black people and many poor whites by raising barriers to voter registration.

Other former Confederate states had passed similar laws since 1890, led by Mississippi, and they maintained such disenfranchisement essentially into the late 1960s.

By Toomer's time, the state was suffering labor shortages due to thousands of rural blacks leaving in the Great Migration to the North and Midwest.

[12] During Toomer's time as principal of Sparta Agricultural and Industrial Institute in Georgia, he wrote stories, sketches, and poems drawn from his experience there.

Cane was celebrated by well-known African-American critics and artists, including Claude McKay, Nella Larsen, Richard Wright, Langston Hughes and Wallace Thurman.

Houston A. Baker, Jr. would call Toomer's Cane a "mysterious brand of Southern psychological realism that has been matched only in the best work of William Faulkner".

Cane has been assessed since the late 20th century as an "analysis of class and caste", with "secrecy and miscegenation as major themes of the first section".

[8] He had conceived it as a short-story cycle, in which he explores the tragic intersection of female sexuality, black manhood, and industrial modernization in the South.

Toomer acknowledged the influence of Sherwood Anderson's Winesburg, Ohio (1919) as his model, in addition to other influential works of that period.

In the 1920s, Toomer and Frank were among many Americans who became deeply interested in the work of the spiritual leader George Ivanovitch Gurdjieff, from Russia, who had a lecture tour in the United States in 1924.

Some scholars have attributed Toomer's artistic silence to his ambivalence about his identity in a culture insistent on forcing binary racial distinctions.

[11] Wallace Thurman, Dorothy Peterson, Aaron Douglas, and Nella Larsen,[15] along with Zora Neale Hurston and George Schuyler,[16] were among those known to have been Toomer's students in the Gurdjieff work during this period.

Later, he studied the psychology developed by Carl Jung, the mystic Edgar Cayce, and the Church of Scientology, but reverted to Gurdjieff's philosophy.

[5] His last literary work published during his lifetime was Blue Meridian, a long poem extolling, "the potential of the American race".

An anti-miscegenation scandal broke, incorporating rumors about the commune they had organized earlier that year in Portage, Wisconsin.

This, itself, may have been part of the issue when it came to his identity — as Larson puts it: "In Cane, Toomer had reached out and attempted to embrace his darkness, but what he had caught within his arms was the fear that if he continued to identify himself as a black man his life would always bear the stigma of restriction.

He had glimpsed the marketplace for the black writer and, in Nellie Y. McKay's words, realized that "it was offered to him on the basis of his 'Negro' blood."

"[23] In preparing a new edition of that work, scholars Henry Louis Gates, Jr. and Rudolph P. Byrd said in 2010 that, based on their research, they believe that Toomer passed for white at periods in his life.

In his essay, “The Negro Emergent,” Toomer describes how African Americans were able to rise from those past identifications in which they were portrayed only as slaves.