https://www.zoranealehurston.com/resource/Recent content in Resources on Zora Neale HurstonHugo -- gohugo.ioen-usThe Official Website of Zora Neale HurstonFri, 04 May 2018 16:38:30 -0400https://www.zoranealehurston.com/resource/interview-with-deborah-g.-plant-editor-of-barracoon/Fri, 04 May 2018 16:38:30 -0400https://www.zoranealehurston.com/resource/interview-with-deborah-g.-plant-editor-of-barracoon/https://www.zoranealehurston.com/resource/teaching-guide-for-barracoon/Fri, 04 May 2018 16:34:06 -0400https://www.zoranealehurston.com/resource/teaching-guide-for-barracoon/Click here to downloadhttps://www.zoranealehurston.com/resource/moses-man-of-the-mountain-syllabus/Tue, 17 Apr 2018 17:33:32 -0400https://www.zoranealehurston.com/resource/moses-man-of-the-mountain-syllabus/“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 story of the Exodus, Zora Neale Hurston blends the Moses of the Old Testament with the Moses of black folklore and song to create a compelling allegory of power, redemption, and faith. Narrating in a mixture of biblical rhetoric, black dialect, and colloquial English, Hurston traces Moses’s life from the day he is launched into the Nile in a reed basket, to his development as a great magician, to his transformation into the heroic rebel leader, the Great Emancipator.https://www.zoranealehurston.com/resource/every-tongue-got-to-confess-syllabus/Tue, 17 Apr 2018 17:31:22 -0400https://www.zoranealehurston.com/resource/every-tongue-got-to-confess-syllabus/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 anthropological text, emerged as the published result of this late-1920s study. But much more of Hurston’s collected folklore from this period was published posthumously in 2001 in Every Tongue Got to Confess: Negro Folk-tales from the Gulf States. Every Tongue Got to Confess features nearly 500 folktales, ranging in length from one sentence to a few pages.https://www.zoranealehurston.com/resource/reading-barracoon/Tue, 17 Apr 2018 15:13:43 -0400https://www.zoranealehurston.com/resource/reading-barracoon/In 1927, Zora Neale Hurston went to Plateau, Alabama, just outside Mobile, to interview eighty-six-year-old Cudjo Lewis. Of the millions of men, women, and children transported from Africa to America as slaves, Cudjo was then the only person alive to tell the story of this integral part of the nation’s history. Hurston was there to record Cudjo’s firsthand account of the raid that led to his capture and bondage fifty years after the Atlantic slave trade was outlawed in the United States.https://www.zoranealehurston.com/resource/reading-their-eyes-were-watching-god/Tue, 17 Apr 2018 15:13:43 -0400https://www.zoranealehurston.com/resource/reading-their-eyes-were-watching-god/When first published in 1937, this novel about a proud, independent black woman was generally dismissed by male reviewers. Out of print for almost thirty years, but since its reissue in paperback edition by the University of Illionois Press in 1978, Their Eyes Were Watching God has become the most widely read and highly acclaimed novel in the canon of African-American literature. With haunting sympathy and piercing immediacy, Their Eyes Were Watching God tells the story of Janie Crawford’s evolving selfhood through three marriages.https://www.zoranealehurston.com/resource/zora-sums-up/Tue, 17 Apr 2018 12:47:14 -0400https://www.zoranealehurston.com/resource/zora-sums-up/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, for, and by Negroes in the United States. The old man was a powerful preacher and also a powerful man and husband; as a slave, says Zora, with the charming practicality which marks the manner of the whole book, he would have fetched a high price for stud stock.https://www.zoranealehurston.com/resource/zora-hurstons-story/Tue, 17 Apr 2018 08:29:33 -0400https://www.zoranealehurston.com/resource/zora-hurstons-story/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 begins she is one of eight children in a Negro family with small prospects of making a name for herself. Yet her story is forthright and without frills. Its emphasis lies on her fighting spirit in the struggle to achieve the education she felt she had to have.https://www.zoranealehurston.com/resource/she-was-the-party-their-eyes-were-watching-god/Mon, 16 Apr 2018 22:33:19 -0400https://www.zoranealehurston.com/resource/she-was-the-party-their-eyes-were-watching-god/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 eyebrows as she claimed four awards: a second-place fiction prize for her short story “Spunk,” a second-place award in drama for her play Color Struck, and two honorable mentions. The names of the writers who beat out Hurston for first place that night would soon be forgotten.https://www.zoranealehurston.com/resource/reading-group-guide-their-eyes-were-watching-god/Mon, 16 Apr 2018 22:31:22 -0400https://www.zoranealehurston.com/resource/reading-group-guide-their-eyes-were-watching-god/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 grandmother, who has raised her from birth, arranges Janie’s marriage to an older local farmer. So begins Janie’s journey toward herself and toward the farthest horizon open to her. Zora Neale Hurston’s classic 1937 novel follows Janie from her Nanny’s plantation shack, to Logan Killicks’s farm, to all-black Eatonville, to the Everglades, and back to Eatonville–where she gathers in “the great fish-net” of her life.https://www.zoranealehurston.com/resource/reading-every-tongue-got-to-confess/Tue, 03 Apr 2018 15:10:07 -0400https://www.zoranealehurston.com/resource/reading-every-tongue-got-to-confess/African-American folklore was Zora Neale Hurston’s first love. Collected in the late 1920s, Every Tongue Got to Confess is the third volume of folk-tales from the celebrated author of Their Eyes Were Watching God. It is published here for the first time. These hilarious, bittersweet, often saucy folk-tales – some of which date back to the Civil War – provide a fascinating, verdant slice of African-American life in the rural South at the turn of the twentieth century.https://www.zoranealehurston.com/resource/their-eyes-were-watching-god-syllabus/Mon, 02 Apr 2018 17:39:46 -0400https://www.zoranealehurston.com/resource/their-eyes-were-watching-god-syllabus/“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 Watching God, is an enduring Southern love story sparkling with wit, beauty, and heartfelt wisdom. Told in the captivating voice of a woman who refuses to live in sorrow, bitterness, fear, or foolish romantic dreams, it is the story of fiercely independent Janie Crawford, and her evolving selfhood through three marriages and a life marked by poverty, trials, and purpose.https://www.zoranealehurston.com/resource/tell-my-horse/Mon, 02 Apr 2018 17:38:45 -0400https://www.zoranealehurston.com/resource/tell-my-horse/“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 Zora Neale Hurston is most often remembered for her inspiring and heartbreaking novel, Their Eyes Were Watching God—but many people don’t know that she graduated from Barnard with a degree in anthropology, and that she spent a great deal of her life and literary career exploring this intellectual pursuit.https://www.zoranealehurston.com/resource/seraph-on-the-suwanee-syllabus/Mon, 02 Apr 2018 17:36:18 -0400https://www.zoranealehurston.com/resource/seraph-on-the-suwanee-syllabus/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 deeply at odds, set among the community of poor white Southerners at the turn of the 20th century. Full of insights into the nature of love, attraction, faith, and loyalty, the novel follows young Arvay Henson, convinced she will never find true happiness, as she defends herself from unwanted suitors with hysterical fits and religious fervor.https://www.zoranealehurston.com/resource/mules-and-men-syllabus/Mon, 02 Apr 2018 17:35:22 -0400https://www.zoranealehurston.com/resource/mules-and-men-syllabus/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 have formed an oral history of the South since the time of slavery. Returning to her hometown of Eatonville, Florida, to gather material, Zora Neale Hurston recalls “a hilarious night with a pinch of everything social mixed with the storytelling.https://www.zoranealehurston.com/resource/instructors-guide-their-eyes-were-watching-god/Sun, 01 Apr 2018 21:42:04 -0400https://www.zoranealehurston.com/resource/instructors-guide-their-eyes-were-watching-god/Click here to download.https://www.zoranealehurston.com/resource/a-protofeminist-postcard-from-haiti/Sun, 01 Apr 2018 21:01:36 -0400https://www.zoranealehurston.com/resource/a-protofeminist-postcard-from-haiti/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 pressure.” By the fall of 1936, when Hurston began working on her transcendent tale of a black woman’s journey of self-discovery, she had already made a name for herself as a promising novelist and anthropologist. In 1934, Hurston had published her first novel, Jonah’s Gourd Vine-partly a fictionalized account of her parents' marriage-to critical acclaim.https://www.zoranealehurston.com/resource/mule-bone-syllabus/Sun, 01 Apr 2018 17:34:40 -0400https://www.zoranealehurston.com/resource/mule-bone-syllabus/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 community—the three-act play Mule Bone. In this hilarious story, Jim and Dave are a struggling song-and-dance team, and when a woman comes between them, chaos ensues in their tiny Florida hometown. This theatrical work broke new ground while triggering a bitter controversy between the collaborators that kept it out of the public eye for sixty years.https://www.zoranealehurston.com/resource/jonah-s-gourd-vine-syllabus/Tue, 20 Mar 2018 17:32:31 -0400https://www.zoranealehurston.com/resource/jonah-s-gourd-vine-syllabus/“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’ marriage. Here, John Pearson—country preacher and unfaithful husband, steps into the role of Zora’s father. Lucy, his long suffering wife, is his true love, but there is also Mehaley and Big ’Oman, as well as the scheming Hattie. Even after becoming the popular pastor of Zion Hope, where his sermons and prayers for cleansing rouse the congregation’s fervor, John has to confess that he is a “natchel man.https://www.zoranealehurston.com/resource/dust-tracks-on-a-road-syllabus/Sat, 17 Mar 2018 17:26:33 -0400https://www.zoranealehurston.com/resource/dust-tracks-on-a-road-syllabus/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 place among the leading artists and intellectuals of the Harlem Renaissance. As compelling as her renowned fiction such as Their Eyes Were Watching God and Jonah’s Gourd Vine, Hurston’s very personal literary self-portrait offers a revealing, often audacious glimpse into the life—public and private—of an extraordinary artist, anthropologist, chronicler, and champion of the black experience in America.https://www.zoranealehurston.com/resource/reading-group-guide-every-tongue-got-to-confess/Tue, 13 Mar 2018 21:45:54 -0400https://www.zoranealehurston.com/resource/reading-group-guide-every-tongue-got-to-confess/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 trajectory of the rich African-American oral tradition. Hurston’s transformation of the spoken into the written, like a lost letter from yesteryear’s speakers to today’s readers, languished undiscovered for decades. In the late 1920s, with the support of Franz Boas of Columbia University, a circle of friends that included members of the Harlem Renaissance, and a wealthy patron named Charlotte Osgood Mason, Zora Neale Hurston set out to collect the folk tales of the rural south.https://www.zoranealehurston.com/resource/the-complete-stories-syllabus/Wed, 07 Mar 2018 17:18:55 -0500https://www.zoranealehurston.com/resource/the-complete-stories-syllabus/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 in The Complete Stories only appeared in literary magazines during her lifetime. Together, they attest to Hurston’s remarkable range, and introduce themes that haunt her lengthier works. Rich in literary imagery and style, with a commanding narrative voice, the collection fully establishes Hurston as a master not just of the long-form narrative, but of the short-form as well.https://www.zoranealehurston.com/resource/reading-mules-and-men/Mon, 05 Mar 2018 15:24:06 -0500https://www.zoranealehurston.com/resource/reading-mules-and-men/Mules and Men is the first great collection of black America’s folk world. In the 1930’s, Zora Neale Hurston returned to her “native village” of Eatonville, Florida to record the oral histories, sermons and songs, dating back to the time of slavery, which she remembered hearing as a child. In her quest, she found herself and her history throughout these highly metaphorical folk-tales, “big old lies,” and the lyrical language of song.https://www.zoranealehurston.com/resource/excerpt-from-their-eyes-were-watching-god/Tue, 19 Mar 2013 04:00:00 +0000https://www.zoranealehurston.com/resource/excerpt-from-their-eyes-were-watching-god/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 away in resignation, his dreams mocked to death by Time. That is the life of men. Now, women forget all those things they don’t want to remember, and remember everything they don’t want to forget.https://www.zoranealehurston.com/resource/excerpt-from-mules-and-men/Tue, 08 Jan 2008 23:34:00 +0000https://www.zoranealehurston.com/resource/excerpt-from-mules-and-men/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 stopped. Yes, there was George Thomas, Calvin Daniels, Jack and Charlie Jones, Gene Brazzle, B. Moseley and “Seaboard.” Deep in a game of Florida-flip. All of those who were not actually playing were giving advice–“bet straightening” they call it.https://www.zoranealehurston.com/resource/excerpt-from-the-complete-stories/Tue, 08 Jan 2008 19:00:50 +0000https://www.zoranealehurston.com/resource/excerpt-from-the-complete-stories/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 bad our boy’s got a spell on ‘im.” The father always met this lament with indifference, if not impatience. “Aw, woman, stop dat talk ‘bout conjure. Tain’t so nohow. Ah doan want Jawn tuh git dat foolishness in him.https://www.zoranealehurston.com/resource/excerpt-from-dust-tracks-on-a-road/Tue, 03 Jan 2006 22:42:08 +0000https://www.zoranealehurston.com/resource/excerpt-from-dust-tracks-on-a-road/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 the time and place where I came from, in order that you may interpret the incidents and directions of my life. I was born in a Negro town. I do not mean by that the black back-side of an average town.https://www.zoranealehurston.com/resource/excerpt-from-every-tongue-got-to-confess/Tue, 01 Oct 2002 04:00:00 +0000https://www.zoranealehurston.com/resource/excerpt-from-every-tongue-got-to-confess/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 tuh de last cause if He had uh made Adam fust an’ let him see Him makin' all dese other things, when Eve wuz made Adam would of stood round braggin' tuh her.https://www.zoranealehurston.com/resource/excerpt-from-mule-bone/Thu, 28 Mar 1991 21:48:11 +0000https://www.zoranealehurston.com/resource/excerpt-from-mule-bone/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 American literature. Langston Hughes published an account entitled “Literary Quarrel” as the penultimate chapter – indeed, almost asa coda or an afterthought – in his autobiography, The Big Sea (1940). Robert Hemenway, Zora Neale Hurston’s biographer, published a chapter in his biography entitled “Mule Bone,” and Arnold Rampersad, Hughes’s biographer, presents an equally detailed account in volume one of his The Life of Langston Hughes.https://www.zoranealehurston.com/resource/excerpt-from-seraph-on-the-sewanee/Mon, 28 Jan 1991 23:32:16 +0000https://www.zoranealehurston.com/resource/excerpt-from-seraph-on-the-sewanee/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 waters, running swift and deep through the primitive forests, and reddened by the chemicals leeched out of drinking roots. On the north, the town is flanked by cultivated fields planted to corn, cane potatoes, tobacco and small patches of cotton.https://www.zoranealehurston.com/resource/excerpt-from-moses-man-of-the-mountain/Mon, 28 Jan 1991 23:24:57 +0000https://www.zoranealehurston.com/resource/excerpt-from-moses-man-of-the-mountain/Have mercy! Lord, have mercy on my poor soul!" Women gave birth and whispered cries like this in caves and out-of-the-way places that humans didn’t usually use for birthplaces. Moses hadn’t come yet, and these were the years when Israel first made tears. Pharaoh had entered the bedrooms of Israel. The birthing beds of Hebrews were matters of state. The Hebrew womb had fallen under the heel of Pharaoh. A ruler great in his newness and new in his greatness had arisen in Egypt and he had said, “This is law.https://www.zoranealehurston.com/resource/excerpt-from-tell-my-horse/Sun, 25 Feb 1990 22:57:23 +0000https://www.zoranealehurston.com/resource/excerpt-from-tell-my-horse/The Rooster’s Nest Jamaica, British West Indies, has something else besides its mountains of majesty and its quick, green valleys. Jamaica has its moments when the land, as in St. Mary’s, thrusts out its sensuous bosom to the sea. Jamaica has its “bush.” That is, the island has more usable plants for medicinal and edible purposes than any other spot on earth. Jamaica has its Norman W. Manley, that brilliant young barrister who looks like the younger Pitt in yellow skin, and who can do as much with a jury as Darrow or Liebowitz ever did.https://www.zoranealehurston.com/resource/excerpt-from-jonah-s-gourd-vine/Mon, 22 Jan 1990 23:19:03 +0000https://www.zoranealehurston.com/resource/excerpt-from-jonah-s-gourd-vine/God was grumbling his thunder and playing the zig-zag lightning thru his fingers. Amy Crittenden came to the door of her cabin to spit out a wad of snuff. She looked up at the clouds. “Ole Massa gwinter scrub floors tuhday,” she observed to her husband who sat just outside the door, reared back in a chair. “Better call dem chaps in outa de cotton patch.” “Tain’t gwine rain,” he snorted, “you always talkin' more’n yuh know.