Claudia Roth Pierpont (Essay Date 17 February 1997)

SOURCE: Pierpont, Claudia Roth. "A Society of One: Zora Neale Hurston, American Contrarian." New Yorker 73, no. 1 (17 February 1997): 80-91.

In the following essay, Pierpont provides an overview of Hurston's career and the public's response to it, and asserts that it is impossible to categorize Hurston's writing.

In the spring of 1938, Zora Neale Hurston informed readers of the Saturday Review of Literature that Mr. Richard Wright's first published book, Uncle Tom's Children, was made up of four novel-las set in a Dismal Swamp of race hatred, in which not a single act of understanding or sympathy occurred, and in which the white man was generally shot dead. "There is lavish killing here," she wrote, "perhaps enough to satisfy all male black readers." Hurston, who had swept onto the Harlem scene a decade before, was one of the very few black women in...