Judy Sobeloff is an instructor at the University of Michigan and the winner of the PEN Northwest Fellowship writing residency award. In the following essay, Sobeloff discusses the themes, origins, and construction of Hurston's story "The Eatonville Anthology."

A major figure of the Harlem Renaissance of the 1920s, Zora Neale Hurston published more books in her lifetime than any other African-American woman, spoke at major universities and received honorary doctorates, and was described in the New York Herald Tribune as being one of the nation's top writers. Her 1937 novel Their Eyes Were Watching God is widely considered a masterpiece today, and one of the most important works of fiction ever written by an African-American woman. Alice Walker insists in the foreword to Hurston's biography: "There is no book more important to me than this one." Yet Hurston died in poverty in 1960, and was buried in an unmarked...