Collected Essays

by Zora Neale Hurston

Hardcover

First published May 1, 1998

About the author

Novels, including Their Eyes Were Watching God (1937), and nonfiction writings of American folklorist Zora Neale Hurston give detailed accounts of African American life in the South.

In 1925, Hurston, one of the leaders of the literary renaissance, happening in Harlem, produced the short-lived literary magazine Fire!! alongside Langston Hughes and Wallace Thurman shortly before she entered Barnard College. This literary movement developed into the Harlem renaissance.

Hurston applied her Barnard ethnographic training to document African American folklore in her critically acclaimed book Mules and Men alongside fiction Their Eyes Were Watching God . She also assembled a folk-based performance dance group that recreated her Southern tableau with one performance on Broadway.

People awarded a Guggenheim fellowship to Hurston to travel to Haiti and conduct research on conjure in 1937. Her significant work ably broke into the secret societies and exposed their use of drugs to create the Vodun trance, also a subject of study for fellow dancer-anthropologist Katherine Dunham, then at the University of Chicago.

In 1954, the Pittsburgh Courier assigned Hurston, unable to sell her fiction, to cover the small-town murder trial of Ruby McCollum, the prosperous black wife of the local lottery racketeer, who had killed a racist white doctor. Hurston also contributed to Woman in the Suwanee County Jail , a book by journalist and civil rights advocate William Bradford Huie.

Reviews

[Lyn]

"Characteristics of Negro Expression" and "What White Publishers Won't Print" with a touch of autobiography. I liked the acknowledgment and argument for the legitimacy of a Black culture and literary vernacular. The latter essay was interesting as it addressed stereotypes that're prevalent in (literary) mediums. Hurston was sure to emphasize the issues of these stereotypes, and the root of those issues, where she addressed a perceived "otherness" concerning black people or minorities. This, according to her, leads to white audiences' disinterest concerning the ordinary representation of any people of color. She is somewhat sympathetic concerning white publishers, as she blames the lack of interest as the predominant problem (not putting the blame entirely on the publishers). Additionally, she pushed for ordinary representation and the telling of ordinary stories as opposed to the representation of exceptional black people, which according to her, fails at eliminating stereotypes.