A literary masterpiece of the Harlem Renaissance Cane is a powerful work of innovative fiction evoking black life in the South. The sketches poems and stories of black rural and urban life that make up Cane are rich in imagery. Visions of smoke sugarcane dusk and flame permeate the Southern landscape: the Northern world is pictured as a harsher reality of asphalt streets. Impressionistic sometimes surrealistic the pieces are redolent of nature and Africa with sensuous appeals to eye and ear.
