Mark Whalan's Race, Manhood and Modernism in America opens with an anecdote retelling Sherwood Anderson's penultimate attempt in 1934 to contact his one-time friend and correspondent, Jean Toomer. Prior to this gesture the men had not been in touch for some ten years, despite their initial close relationship. Whalan uses this episode, the unanswered letter, as a means of contextualizing the bringing together of this seemingly unlikely pairing: the purveyor of small-town American values and one of the more experimental of the Harlem Renaissance writers. The juxtaposition of the pair instantly destabilizes these reputations, which of course is the author's intention. Whalan identifies something much more modern than nostalgic in Anderson's writing and he draws on primary source materials and previous scholarship to document Toomer's falling out of love with the Harlem Renaissance, from his very public acrimony with Alain Locke to his refusal to allow Cane (1923) to be included in a volume edited by James Weldon Johnson.

This thickening, or at least complicating, of literary legacies is at the heart of Whalan's monograph, which self-consciously moves from formalist readings of Winesburg, Ohio (1919) and Cane to a more contextual account of the production of both texts and, more precisely, assesses the influence of the Young Americans on both writers. What lies at the heart of the Anderson–Toomer relationship, and indeed at the heart of Whalan's treatment of them, is their interaction (and friendship) with Waldo Frank. Indeed, Frank is the critical nexus that links the two writers; in Frank, as Whalan shows, both Anderson and Toomer identify strands which syncopate with their own authorial visions: an engagement with the emergent discourse of anthropology, a critique of the reifying tendencies of industrialization, a cultural nationalism which is linked with a celebration of the healthy male body, a desire for national regeneration, and a concern with “authentic” racial identities.

Whalan is keen to link his subjects with their socio-intellectual contexts, and thus identifies a lacuna in critical treatments of Winesburg, Ohio, namely its status as a product of the Great War and associated anxieties of gender identities. He goes on to link this with those thematic strands in Anderson that are more frequently discussed, such as the tensions regarding the industrialization of the United States and its associated assault on masculinity. Whalan also interweaves his analysis with biographical detail, noting Anderson's time in Chicago and his immersion in the city's increasingly visible gay subculture, as well as the author's anxieties regarding the feminization of masculinity and subsequent fixation on the healthy, male, black body as a symbol of virile and resilient American masculinity. That Whalan manages to maintain all of these narrative strands and merge them with insightful close readings of Anderson's stories is testimony to his strength as a literary and cultural historian. He creates a well-delineated picture of Anderson, which lays down a credible context for his interest in Frank and his strange epistolary relationship with Toomer.

This relationship is further explored in Whalan's The Letters of Jean Toomer, 1919–1924, which reveals not only the breakdown in the relationship between Anderson and Toomer but also the changing tides of the Frank–Toomer relationship. When Whalan's two books are read side by side, the nuances of the relationships between these three men are pulled into sharp focus and their shared obsessive quest for “authenticity” (whether that be in terms of masculinity, dialect, primitivism or racial identity) emerges as something more than idiosyncratic tendencies, but as a real cultural concern rooted in wartime anxieties, anthropological trends, and a burgeoning age of mass consumerism. Thus Whalan presents more than a simple narrative of the spark and decline of a literary friendship; rather, he gives us a powerful portrait of an intellectual milieu.

In his chapters on Anderson and Frank, Whalan charts the journey of their fascination with the “primitive” or the “authentic” which they perceived to be inherent in African American masculinity and dialect. Hence Anderson's interest in Toomer's work as the closest approximation to the African American voice, as “really negro.” But it was Anderson's insistence on race as biologically essential which severed the friendship with Toomer. Similarly, Frank's insistence on racial mimicry, his method of ethnographic excavation of “authentic buried cultures,” and his assertion of the close relation between space and racial identity placed a strain on the friendship and eventually pushed Toomer to break with him.

Undoubtedly, Whalan's chapters on Toomer are the strongest sections of Race, Manhood and Modernism in America, not least because it is here that the narrative reaches its natural climax. Perhaps because the author has spent much time with Toomer's letters, too, there is a more compelling sense of Toomer's rather difficult character than there is with Anderson, and there seems a much closer textual engagement with Cane than Winesburg, Ohio or the later Anderson books. Above all, Whalan makes sense of Toomer's development, his evolution as a writer, inflected with the textures of his relationships with Anderson and Frank. Thus Toomer's writing seems to suggest that Frank's notion of a regionally rooted authentic black subjectivity would have to be dismantled before any radical politics of changing America's racial discourse could take effect. Furthermore, whereas Anderson saw changes in industrialization and gender as potentially divisive threats, Toomer began to view them as powerful vehicles for articulating new, modern visions of racial identities.

In the end, therefore, what makes Race, Manhood and Modernism in America such a valuable book is its detailed and convincing narrative of Toomer's intellectual and artistic growth. It can be supplemented, too, with the superbly edited and annotated Letters, showing how Toomer's sense of himself as an artist and intellectual unfolded during these crucial years of his life. For all that, it would be an oversight not to mention the excellent chapters on Anderson, which offer a real insight into the anxieties which propel his most influential work. As a narrative of a friendship, a portrait of an age, and a forensic piece of literary scholarship, Whalan's book is a first-class achievement.