Cane is a literary masterpiece of the Harlem Renaissance, presenting a powerful work of innovative fiction that evokes black life in the South. The book is a collection of sketches, poems, and stories that depict both black rural and urban life.

The imagery is rich and vivid, with visions of smoke, sugarcane, dusk, and flame permeating the Southern landscape. In contrast, the Northern world is portrayed as a harsher reality filled with asphalt streets.

Impressionistic and sometimes surrealistic, the pieces in Cane are redolent of nature and Africa, offering sensuous appeals to the eye and ear.