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“A narrative of great power. Warm with friendly personality and pulsating with…profound eloquence and religious fervor.” —New York Times
In the 1939 novel Moses, Man of the Mountain, based on the …

Zora Neale Hurston journeyed through the American Gulf States for an anthropological study funded by Charlotte Osgood Mason, a wealthy philanthropist. Mules and Men, Hurston’s first major …

Review of Dust Tracks on a Road
The Saturday Review, November 28, 1942
By Phil Strong
Zora Neale Hurston’s father was the preacher and chief factotum of Eatonville, Fla., one of the few villages of, …

Here is a thumping story, though it has none of the horrid earmarks of the Alger-type climb. Zora Neale Hurston has a considerable reputation as anthropologist and writer. When her autobiography …

by Valerie Boyd
Zora Neale Hurston knew how to make an entrance. On May 1, 1925, at a literary awards dinner sponsored by Opportunity magazine, the earthy Harlem newcomer turned heads and raised …

Plot Summary Under “a blossoming pear tree” in West Florida, sixteen-year-old Janie Mae Crawford dreams of a world that will answer all her questions and waits “for the world to be made.” But her …

“There is no book more important to me than this one.”—Alice Walker
One of the most important works of 20th-century American literature, Zora Neale Hurston’s beloved 1937 classic, Their Eyes Were …

“Vivid, sometimes lyrical, occasionally strikingly dramatic, yet simple and unrestrained…an unusual and intensely interesting book richly packed with strange information.”—New York Times Book Review …

Acclaimed for her pitch-perfect accounts of rural black life and culture, Zora Neale Hurston explored new territory in her novel Seraph on the Suwanee—a story of two people at once deeply in love and …

Mules and Men is a treasury of black America’s folklore as collected by Zora Neale Hurston, the storyteller and anthropologist who grew up hearing the songs and sermons, sayings, and tall tales that …

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by Valerie Boyd
Zora Neale Hurston wrote Their Eyes Were Watching God under emotional duress. She’d kept the novel “dammed up” inside for months, she would recall, and she wrote it under “internal …

In 1930, two giants of African-American literature, Zora Neale Hurston and Langston Hughes, joined forces to create a lively, insightful, often wildly farcical look inside a rural Southern black …

“A bold and beautiful book, many a page priceless and unforgettable.”—Carl Sandburg
Zora Neale Hurston’s first novel Jonah’s Gourd Vine, published in 1934, is based on the story of her parents’ …

Dust Tracks on a Road is Zora Neale Hurston’s candid, funny, bold, and poignant autobiography, an imaginative and exuberant account of her rise from childhood poverty in the rural South to a prominent …

Introduction Storytelling is an essential element of many cultures and held dear by communities whose identities have been formed in extremely difficult circumstances. This has certainly been the …

Zora Neale Hurston’s The Complete Stories is a landmark collection of short fiction that showcases the evolution of one of the greatest American authors. Spanning from 1921 to 1955, most of the tales …

Ships at a distance have every man’s wish on board. For some they come in with the tide. For others they sail forever on the horizon, never out of sight, never landing until the Watcher turns his eyes …

As I crossed the Maitland-Eatonville township line I could see a group on the store porch. I was delighted. The town had not changed. Same love of talk and song. So I drove on down there before I …

Chapter One
John Redding Goes to Sea
The Villagers said that John Redding was a queer child. His mother thought he was too. She would shake her head sadly, and observe to John’s father: “Alf, it’s too …

My Birthplace Like the dead-seeming, cold rocks, I have memories within that came out of the material that went to make me. Time and place have had their say.
So you will have to know something about …

Why God Made Adam Last God wuz through makin' de Ian' an' de sea an' de birds an' de animals an' de fishes an' de trees befo' He made man. He wuz intendin' tuh make ‘im all along, but He put it off …

And fall out, unfortunately, they did, thereby creating the most notorious literary quarrel in African-American cultural history, and one of the most thoroughly documented collaborations in black …

Sawley, the town, is in west Florida, on the famous Suwanee River. It is flanked on the south by the curving course of the river which Stephen Foster made famous without ever having looked upon its …