Cane was largely ignored during the Harlem Renaissance by the average white and African American reader. Langston Hughes addressed this in his essay “The Negro Artist and the Racial Mountain" by saying, “'O, be respectable, write about nice people, show how good we are,' say the Negroes. 'Be stereotyped, don’t go too far, don’t shatter our illusions about you, don’t amuse us too seriously. We will pay you,' say the whites. Both would have told Jean Toomer not to write Cane. The colored people did not praise it. Although the critics gave it good reviews, the public remained indifferent. Yet (excepting the works of Du Bois) Cane contains the finest prose written by a Negro in America. And like the singing of Robeson it is truly racial."Hughes, Langston, "The Negro Artist and the Racial Mountain", Angelyn Mitchell (ed.), Within the Circle: An Anthology of African American Literary Criticism from the Harlem Renaissance to the Present, Durham: Duke University Press, 1994. 55-59. Hughes suggests that Cane failed to be popular among the masses because it did not reinforce white views of African Americans. It did not fit the model of the “Old Negro” and did not depict the lifestyle of African Americans living in Harlem that whites wanted to see.
