Customer Reviews

Zora Neale Hurston : Folklore, Memoirs, and Other Writings : Mules and Men, Tell My Horse, Dust Tracks on a Road, Selected Articles (The Library of America, 75)

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This book and its companion from the library of america, have everything that Hurston wrote - except some unedited manuscripts, and some articles and short stories.

Her interest in language, folklore and ritual, and the cult of local color comes through in all of her works. The personalities and struggles, failures and victories of all of her characters become real for the reader.

She is writing earlier in the 20th century, when people were starting to buy radios and automobiles -- she saw a lot of the south, and north, rapidly transform into the beginnings of the consumer culture we know today.

When I read Hurston, it is like I feel an anxiety to preserve. I sense a underlying insight, that she probably had, that within a couple of generations, the rhythm of life would radically change.

I think she saw that a lot of the folk traditions and rituals in North America would disappear, so she did what she could to demonstrate a vibrant african american cultural life, as she knew it, and interpreted it.

The two collections of Hurston's work show the span of her writing, over her lifetime. These pieces reveal how many of her imagination and many of her themes and character-types evolve over the years.

I recommend the two volumes.

The debate of whether Ms Hurston was a true Harlem Renaissance writer is does so little justice to her contributions to that scene that I spent an entire semester debating it. Of course she was and she was one of the writers who helped give it its significance. Just the scene in Jonah's Gourd where she is talking about the physical features of the male protagonist is important enough. Her "peope" are real and you wonder if she had interacted with them in real life because they are your neighbors, relatives and friends...they are just that touchable. Her pain in life comes through all her books but you are so busy savoring her prose that you only wonder about it after you are done. The best thing to do is to gather several authors from that period and read them all. She is among the genius of the era but you will see how far she stands out from the brilliant.