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Zora Neale Hurston: Folklore, Memoirs, & Other Writings

Mules and Men | Tell My Horse | Dust Tracks on a Road | essays More

Edited by Cheryl A. Wall

“Her vivid imagination, mastery of form and personal courage converge in these two volumes, meticulously edited and annotated by Cheryl A. Wall.” — Chicago Tribune

Overview
News & Views
Table of Contents

Overview

Story of the Week Zora Neale Hurston, “John Redding Goes to Sea”
October 22, 2021

Story of the Week Zora Neale Hurston, “Spunk”
March 1, 2021

News Zora Neale Hurston: Video of her ethnographic work in Florida in 1928
June 26, 2020

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This Library of America volume, with its companion, brings together for the first time all of the best writing of Zora Neale Hurston, one of the most significant twentieth-century American writers, in one authoritative set.

“Folklore is the arts of the people,” Hurston wrote, “before they find out that there is any such thing as art.” A pioneer of African American ethnography who did graduate study in anthropology with the renowned Franz Boas, Hurston devoted herself to preserving the black folk heritage. In Mules and Men (1935), the first book of African American folklore written by an African American, she returned to her native Florida and to New Orleans to record stories and sermons, blues and work songs, children’s games, courtship rituals, and formulas of voodoo doctors. This classic work is presented here with the original illustrations by the great Mexican artist Miguel Covarrubias.

Tell My Horse (1938), part ethnography, part travel book, vividly recounts the survival of African religion in Jamaican obeah and Haitian voodoo in the 1930s. Keenly alert to political and intellectual currents, Hurston went beyond superficial exoticism to explore the role of these religious systems in their societies. The text is illustrated by twenty-six photographs, many of them taken by Hurston. Her extensive transcriptions of Creole songs are here accompanied by new translations.

A special feature of this volume is Hurston’s controversial 1942 autobiography, Dust Tracks on a Road. With consultation by Henry Louis Gates, Jr., it is presented here for the first time as she intended, restoring passages omitted by the original because of political controversy, sexual candor, or fear of libel. Included in an appendix are four additional chapters, one never published, which represent earlier stages of Hurston’s conception of the book.

Twenty-two essays, from “The Eatonville Anthology” (1926) to “Court Order Can’t Make Races Mix” (1955), demonstrate the range of Hurston’s concerns as they cover subjects from religion, music, and Harlem slang to Jim Crow and American democracy.

The chronology of Hurston’s life prepared for this edition sheds fresh light on many aspects of her career. In addition, this volume contains detailed notes and a brief essay on the texts.

Cheryl A. Wall, volume editor, is Zora Neale Hurston Professor of English at Rutgers University. She is the editor of Changing Our Own Words: Essays on Criticism, Theory, and Writing by Black Women and the author of Worrying the Line.

This Library of America series edition is printed on acid-free paper and features Smyth-sewn binding, a full cloth cover, and a ribbon marker.

This volume is available for adoption in the Guardian of American Letters Fund.
News & Views

Story of the Week Zora Neale Hurston, “John Redding Goes to Sea”
October 22, 2021

Story of the Week Zora Neale Hurston, “Spunk”
March 1, 2021

News Zora Neale Hurston: Video of her ethnographic work in Florida in 1928
June 26, 2020

Interviews Michelle Dean’s Sharp celebrates ten women writers who did it their way
April 18, 2018

News A new “model of black selfhood,” and a heroine ahead of her time, in Their Eyes Were Watching God
June 10, 2016
Table of Contents

Mules and Men

Tell My Horse

Dust Tracks on a Road

Selected Articles
The Eatonville Anthology
How It Feels To Be Colored Me from Negro: An Anthology
Characteristics of Negro Expression
Conversions and Visions
Shouting
Mother Catherine
Uncle Monday
Spirituals and Neo-Spirituals
Works-in-Progress for Florida Federal Writers’ Project, The Florida Negro, 1938
Folklore and Music
Negro Mythical Places
The Ocoee Riot
The Sanctified Church
Art and Such
Stories of Conflict: Richard Wright’s Uncle Tom’s Children
The “Pet Negro” System
High John de Conquer
Negroes Without Self-Pity
My Most Humiliating Jim Crow Experience
The Rise of the Begging Joints
Crazy for This Democracy
What White Publishers Won’t Print
Court Order Can’t Make Races Mix

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ISBN: 978-0-940450-84-4 1024 pages

LOA books are distributed worldwide by Penguin Random House

N° 75 Library of America Series

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