In the following essay, Meisenhelder analyzes the narrative techniques that Hurston utilizes to explore racial and sexual issues in Mules and Men.

In the following essay, Jordan finds similarities between Mules and Men and J. Frank Dobie's Tongues of the Monte, maintaining that because of their unconventional formats, both books offer “a more holistic version of the folklore they present.”

In the following essay, Green contends that Hurston and Kate Chopin “both construct communities in which woman is equated with Other” in their respective stories “Sweat” and “Beyond the Bayou.”

In the following essay, Wall contends that Hurston's narrative strategy in Mules and Men allows her to represent the ways in which women are relegated to subordinate roles in African American culture.

In the following essay, Classon probes Color Struck as a work of social criticism and as the “tragedy of a darkskinned woman.” Additionally, Classon emphasizes the importance of this relatively neglected play to an understanding of Hurston's life and work.

In the following essay, Boyd offers an initial evaluation of Mule Bone, a plays she suggests requires further critical study. She examines the famous literary quarrel of its authors, Hurston and Langston Hughes, and maintains that although the play presents stereotyped characters and a weak plot, it features a tragic sensibility beneath its comic surface.

In the following essay, Speisman surveys Hurston's career as a dramatist and her influence on American theater.

In the following essay, Harrison investigates the influence of anthropological concepts developed by Franz Boas and his contemporaries on the narrative strategy of Hurston and Mary Hunter Austin.

In the following essay, Chinn and Dunn assert that “The Gilded Six-Bits” underscores Hurston's artistry as a fiction writer, folklorist, and historian.

In the following essay, Champion asserts that Hurston depicts strong women in her stories who “develop independence in spite of oppressive social conditions, particularly those influenced by a politics of gender- and ethnic-biased economics.”

In the following essay, Boxwell assesses Hurston's achievement as ethnographer in Mules and Men.

In the following essay, Lowe studies Hurston's dramatic works and the difficulties she experienced getting them into production.

In the following essay, Lester examines the homoerotic aspects of “Story in Harlem Slang: Jelly's Tale.”

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.

In the following excerpt, originally published in 1931, Hurston explains the view of African-American expression that informs her works, observing the drama, originality, and dialect of black communication.

In the following essay, Andrews explores the tradition of verbal assertiveness amongst African American women through an analysis of Mules and Men.

In the following essay, Hurd offers a thematic and stylistic analysis of “Sweat.”

In the following essay, Seidel asserts that “Sweat” is valuable for its depiction of the economic situation in Eatonville, Florida, in the early decades of the twentieth century as well as its “harsh, unrelenting indictment of the economic and personal degradation of marriage in a racist and sexist society.”

The critical perspectives inspired by the black consciousness and feminist movements allow us to see Hurston's writings in a new way. They correct distorted views of her folklore as charming and quaint, set aside misperceptions of her characters as minstrels caught, in Richard Wright's phrase, "between laughter and tears" [see excerpt above]. These new perspectives inform this re-evaluation of Hurston's work. She asserted that black people, while living in a racist society...

In the following essay, Carson discusses Hurston's early “Florida” plays: Color Struck, The First One, and The Fiery Chariot.

A study of Zora Neale Hurston, writer, properly begins with Zora Neale Hurston, wanderer. In her autobiography, Dust Tracks on a Road—in her artful candor and coy reticence, her contradictions and silences, her irrationalities and extravagant boasts which plead for the world to recognize and respect her—one perceives the matrix of her fiction, the seeds that sprouted and the cankers that destroyed. Contradictions in the autobiography reveal that the content was prepared with concern for its ap...

Folklore, Hurston said, is the art people create before they find out there is such as thing as art; it come from a folk's "first wondering contact with natural law"—that is, laws of human nature as well as laws of natural process, the truths of a group's experience as well as the principles of physics. These interpretations of nature, called "unscientific" or "crude," often turn out to be wise and poetic explanations for the ways of the world. ...

In the following essay, Jones contends that “The Gilded Six-Bits” reflects elements of the pastoral and picaresque literary traditions.

[Miss Hurston's goal in her nonfiction] was not merely to collect folklore but to show the beauty and wealth of genuine Negro material. In doing so, she placed herself on the side of those who saw nothing self-defeating in writing about the black masses, who, she felt, are more imaginative than their middle-class counterparts. Consequently, few of the latter are included in her works. Often, her characters work and live in sawmill camps. Some are sharecroppers. Some work on railroads. Most are uneduc...

In the following review, originally published in the New York Times on February 15, 1991, Rich enumerates several flaws in the Lincoln Center Theater production of Mule Bone, and observes that the play “feels like a rough draft in which two competing voices are trying to reach a compromise.”

Despite structural and formal defects, Jonah's Gourd Vine is most important for its depiction of the character of the black woman. Lucy is far from being completely developed as a character. She does, however, contain elements seldom seen in fiction by men which feature black women. Moreover, Miss Hurston, in her portrayal of Lucy, has begun early to deal with the conflict between black men and women, which receives fuller explication in Chester Himes's Lonely Crusade and John Williams'...

A friend of mine … [told] me that she and another woman had been discussing Zora Neale Hurston and had decided they wouldn't have liked her. They wouldn't have liked the way—when her play Color Struck! won second prize in a literary contest at the beginning of her career—Hurston walked into a room full of her competitors, flung her scarf dramatically over her shoulder, and yelled "COLOR..R. R STRUCK..K. K!" at the top of her voice. Apparently it isn't ...

In the following essay, Hale explores Hurston's allusion to Hamlet in her story “Spunk.”

[It] is exceedingly interesting to read a new biography of the Hebrew prophet [Moses] written by an American Negro. Zora Neale Hurston has already acquired fame as a writer, and in Moses: Man of the Mountain she reveals marked ability as a student and interpreter of Negro folkways. It is a magnificent story, but it is weak in its interpretation of the ethical contributions of the prophet and in its treatment of the code of laws handed down by him. For to Jews, Moses is primarily the lawgiver, the great crea...

Though "Seraph on the Suwanee" is the love story of a daughter of Florida Crackers and of a scion of plantation owners, it is no peasant-marries-the prince tale. Arvay Henson, true Cracker in breeding, is above her caste in temperament; James Kenneth Meserve is plain Jim who speaks the dialect and who has turned his back on family, with its static living in the past, to become foreman in a west Florida turpentine camp. Neither is it a romance of the boy-meets-girl school. Beginning conventiona...

["Moses: Man of the Mountain"] is the story of Moses as the Negro sees and interprets [him]…. None the less reverent in conception than that of the white man, there is one aspect of the work of the great leader of the Israelites which holds particular fascination for the Negro, so that his view becomes especially interesting, and, again always in a reverent way, entertaining. All primitive peoples have an inordinate love of magic, or what appears to be magic, and the African most of all...

[Here, in "Mules and Men,"] is the high color of Color as a racial element in the American scene. And it comes neither from Catfish Row nor from a Harlem with a jazz tempo affected by the rhythm of Broadway to which contribute so many exotic strains newer to that scene than the African. In this book … [Hurston] has invited the outside world to listen in while her own people are being as natural as they can never be when white folks are literally present. This in an environment in the de...

It isn't that [Their Eyes Were Watching God] is bad, but that it deserves to be better. In execution it is too complex and wordily pretty, even dull—yet its conception of these simple Florida Negroes is unaffected and really beautiful. [There is] some very shrewd picturing of Negro life in its naturally creative and unself-conscious grace (the book is absolutely free of Uncle Toms, absolutely unlimbered of the clumsy formality, defiance and apology of a Minority Cause). And when Tea Cake [the ...

[If] "Jonah's Gourd Vine" is a story with a background of sociology, "Mules and Men" is a social study with gusto of a story. Indeed, it is hard to think of anybody interested in the negro whom this new book will not delight. The southern raconteur who justly prides himself upon his large store of stories about the colored man will here find himself beaten on his own ground, but having gained a new supply of tales to tell. The student of folk-lore will find a well-filled s...

There is no indication that Zora N. Hurston was ever well known—as a writer or as a person—among the masses during her lifetime. With an impressive group of people—the elitists—on the other hand, she enjoyed brief periods of notoriety…. While a few lampoon her for what they consider her lack of social consciousness, her tendency to transcend racism and prejudices by disallowing them a major role in her works, and for technical and narrative deficiences in her fiction, most...

Folklore is a spontaneous product of vitality and imagination. It needs a careful interpreter whose reports have these same two qualities. Seldom has there been a happier combination than that of the vivid, fantastic folklore of the West Indies and interpreter Zora Neale Hurston…. [She is] one of the most delightfully alive personalities of our day. She knows what she is talking about and she talks with a zest and a humor and a genuineness that make her work the best that I know in the field of conte...

[The following essay was originally published in 1937.] [Zora Neale Hurston's] short stories "Drenched With Light," "Spunk" and "The Gilded Six Bits" showed a command of folklore and idiom excelled by no earlier Negro novelist. Jonah's Gourd Vine (1934) recounts the rise of handsome, stalwart John Buddy from plowboy to moderator of the Baptists of Florida. But his flair for preaching and praying is exceeded by his weakness for women…. Loosely co...

The story of Moses has roots deep in the Hebraic imagination and Jews are proud to call it their own. Their minds have been especially busy with it in the last few years as the old narrative of persecution and injustice has repeated itself. Now [in "Moses: Man of the Mountain"] Zora Neale Hurston has told the story of the law-giver from the point of view of another race, also once enslaved and persecuted, and it has lent itself so aptly that it has become a fine Negro novel. Miss Hurston has m...

"Jonah's Gourd Vine" can be called without fear of exaggeration the most vital and original novel about the American Negro that has yet been written by a member of the Negro race. Miss Hurston … has made the study of Negro folklore her special province. This may very well account for the brilliantly authentic flavor of her novel and for her excellent rendition of Negro dialect. Unlike the dialect in most novels about the American Negro, this does not seem to be merely the speech ...

[Hurst, a popular novelist in the 1920s and 1930s, employed Hurston as a secretary-companion during Hurston's first years in New York City.] Here in ["Jonah's Gourd Vine"] there springs, with validity and vitality a fresh note which, to this commentator, is unique.

["Jonah's Gourd Vine"] is the product of a fortunate combination of circumstances. [Hurston] writes as a Negro understanding her people and having opportunities that could come to no white person, however sympathetic, of seeing them when they are utterly themselves. But she writes as a Negro whose intelligence is firmly in the saddle, who recognizes the value of an objective style in writing, and who is able to use the wealth of material available to her with detachment and with a full ...

["Dust Tracks on a Road"] is a thumping story, though it has none of the horrid earmarks of the [Horatio] Alger-type climb. Zora Neale Hurston has a considerable reputation as anthropologist and writer. When her autobiography begins she was 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. The uses t...

Ever since the time of Uncle Remus, Negro folk-lore has exerted a strong attraction upon the imagination of the American public. Negro tales, songs and sayings without end, as well as descriptions of Negro magic and voodoo, have appeared; but in all of them the intimate setting in the social life of the Negro has been given very inadequately. It is the great merit of Miss Hurston's [Mules and Men] that she entered into the homely life of the southern Negro as one of them and was fully accepted as suc...

There is nothing in the title to indicate that ["Mules and Men"] is a picture of the negro mind revealed with commendable objectivity by a negro writer with a vivid pen. It is straining the term to call these stories folk-lore, since in themselves they are individual flights of fancy. Yet in sum they project, as it were, a composite image of the American negro's imagination with its whimsicality, its American love of exaggeration, and its under-dog's admiration of victorious cunn...

[This essay was originally published in 1936.] [One] can readily see why Miss Hurston's first novel, Jonah's Gourd Vine, was received with small enthusiasm from certain quarters of the Negro race. With a grasp of her material that has seldom been equaled by a writer of her race, she had every opportunity of creating a masterpiece of the age. But she failed. She failed not from lack of skill but from lack of vision. The hero, John Buddy, who rose from an outcast bastard of an Alabama tenant far...

[Zora Neale Hurston's autobiography] "Dust Tracks on a Road" should not be read for its comments on the Negro as a whole. Miss Hurston feels that God made Negroes, as he made all other people, "duck by duck." She says, "That was the only way I could see them." She urges the powerful of the earth to "think kindly of those who walk in the dust." She suggests to the humble ones that they respect those who are not so humble. She invites all to be ki...