SOURCE: Wainwright, Mary Katherine. “Subversive Female Folk Tellers in Mules and Men.” In Zora in Florida, edited by Steve Glassman and Kathryn Lee Seidel, pp. 62-75. Orlando: University of Central Florida Press, 1991.

In the following essay, Wainwright views Hurston's female storytellers in Mules and Men as a way to subvert conventional gender roles and male authority.

During the Great Depression, Zora Neale Hurston served as general editor of and a contributor to the Florida volume of the Federal Writers' Project American Guide Series. Robert Hemenway devotes only two paragraphs of his 1977 biography on Hurston to describing her brief tenure with the Federal Writers' Project, and other scholars and devotees of Hurston have also tended, as I had, to ignore or forget this detail of her life.

Several years ago, however, I happened quite by accident on a library copy of the 1939 Florida: A Guide to the Southernmost State...