Back Novels & Stories

Zora Neale Hurston: Novels & Stories

Jonah’s Gourd Vine | Their Eyes Were Watching God | Moses, Man of the Mountain | Seraph on the Suwanee | stories More

Edited by Cheryl A. Wall

“The greatest pleasure of Hurston’s writing is that you never know what she’ll say next or how she’ll say it.” — Newsweek

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

This Library of America volume, with its companion, brings together for the first time all of Zora Neale Hurston’s best writing in one authoritative set. When she died in poverty and obscurity in 1960, all of her books were out of print. Today Hurston’s groundbreaking works, suffused with the culture and traditions of African Americans and the poetry of black speech, have won her recognition as one of the most significant modern American writers.

Hurston’s fiction is free-flowing and frequently experimental, exuberant in its storytelling and open to unpredictable and fascinating digressions. Jonah’s Gourd Vine (1934), based on the lives of her parents and evoking in rich detail the world of her childhood, recounts the rise and fall of a powerful preacher torn between spirit and flesh in an all-black town in Florida.

“There is no book more important to me than this one,” novelist Alice Walker has written about Their Eyes Were Watching God (1937), Hurston’s lyrical masterpiece about a woman’s determined struggle for love and independence. In this, her most acclaimed work, she employs a striking range of tones and voices to give the story of Janie and Tea Cake the poetic intensity of a myth.

In Moses, Man of the Mountain (1939), her high-spirited and utterly personal retelling of the Exodus story, Hurston again demonstrates her ability to use the black vernacular as the basis for a supple and compelling prose style.

Seraph on the Suwanee (1948), Hurston’s last major work, is set in turn-of-the-century Florida and portrays the passionate clash between a poor southern “cracker” and her willful husband.

A selection of short stories (among them “Spunk,” “The Bone of Contention,” and “Story in Harlem Slang”) further displays Hurston’s unique fusion of folk traditions and literary modernism—comic, ironic, and soaringly poetic.

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.

Zora Neale Hurston: Novels & Stories is kept in print with a gift from the Charles and Lucille King Family Foundation, made in memory of Diana King, to the Guardians 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

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

News Scholars rediscover three forgotten stories by Zora Neale Hurston
May 19, 2016
Table of Contents

Jonah’s Gourd Vine

Their Eyes Were Watching God

Moses, Man of the Mountain

Seraph on the Suwanee

Selected Stories
John Redding Goes to Sea
Drenched in Light
Spunk
Sweat
The Bone of Contention
Book of Harlem
The Gilded Six-Bits
The Fire and the Cloud
Story in Harlem Slang

30.00 List Price: $40.00 (Save: 25%) Free shipping on orders $50 and over

Or buy from our partners

Phone orders: 1-800-964-5778 Request product #200743

ISBN: 978-0-940450-83-7 1054 pages

LOA books are distributed worldwide by Penguin Random House

N° 74 Library of America Series

Subscribers can purchase the slipcased edition by signing in to their accounts.

Related Books

Richard Wright: Early Works LOA N°55

The Essential Gwendolyn Brooks

Zora Neale Hurston: Folklore, Memoirs, & Other Writings LOA N°75

Harlem Renaissance Novels (boxed set)

Library of America

CURATOR

A champion of America’s great writers and timeless works, Library of America guides readers in finding and exploring the exceptional writing that reflects the nation’s history and culture.

Learn More

PUBLISHER

From poetry, novels, and memoirs to journalism, crime writing, and science fiction, the more than 300 volumes published by Library of America are widely recognized as America’s literary canon.

Browse our books Subscribe

NON-PROFIT

With contributions from donors, Library of America preserves and celebrates a vital part of our cultural heritage for generations to come.

Support our mission

Zora Neale Hurston: Novels & Stories

Related Books

Get 10% off your first Library of America purchase.