The Gilded Six-Bits | Literary Criticism & Book Review

The Gilded Six-Bits Critical Overview

In 1933, when Hurston was a rising star of the Harlem Renaissance and an impoverished drama instructor at Bethune-Cookman College in Day tona, Florida, she showed her story, "The Gilded Six-Bits," to an English professor there. He liked it so much that he not only read it to his writing class, but took it upon himself to submit it to Story, a well known literary magazine. Bertram Lippincott, a New York publisher wise to the black folk-art trend, then took it upon himself to write to Hurston, expressing interest in publishing any novel she might be working on. This led Hurston to begin and quickly finish her first novel, Jonah's Gourd Vine. Thus "The Gilded Six-Bits" was pivotal to her professional development as a fiction writer. (She was already on her way to establishing herself in the field of anthropology under the mentorship of notable anthropologist Franz Boas).

Hurston...
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