"Spunk" was received favorably from the very beginning, taking second place in the Opportunity literary contest, being published in the magazine, and then being selected for Alain Locke's anthology The New Negro, all within a few months. That first success led to others, and Hurston's work was wellregarded for the next fifteen years. Her novels were widely reviewed. Reviewers focused their attention on the local color aspects of the novels and debated whether her characters' dialectical speech was a strength or a weakness. Her autobiography, Dust Tracks on a Road (1942), won the Ainsfield Award in Racial Relations. However, she had no great commercial success, and although her works were widely reviewed, there was no serious scholarly criticism of her work during her lifetime. During the civil rights movement of the 1950s and 1960s, writings like "Spunk," depicting rural African Americans speaking in dialect and believing in...