Download or read book Zora Neale Hurston s Final Decade written by Virginia Lynn Moylan and published by . This book was released on 2011 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Moylan, founding member of the Fort Pierce, Fla., Annual Zora Festival, draws heavily on two texts (Valerie Boyd's biography Wrapped in Rainbows, and Carla Kaplan's edition of Hurston's letters, Zora Neale Hurston: A Life in Letters), supplemented by a number of interviews with the employers, acquaintances, and friends of Hurston's last decade. After a brief biographical sketch of Hurston's early years, Moylan addresses, the false child molestation charges that, even after they were recanted, left Hurston's reputation in tatters, and her very controversial (in Moylan's words, "eccentric") objections to Brown v. Board of Education and desegregation on the grounds that, in her perspective, "racial uplift" would come by individual effort alone. Hurston's final creative projects-her development of an "anthropologically correct" black baby doll and planned biography of King Herod attest to how the famously idiosyncratic and iconoclastic writer remained deeply unpredictable and fascinating, and that her "lost years" merit a thoughtful and thorough biography

Download or read book Zora Neale Hurston written by Carla Kaplan, Ph.D. and published by Anchor. This book was released on 2007-12-18 with total page 906 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: “ I mean to live and die by my own mind,” Zora Neale Hurston told the writer Countee Cullen. Arriving in Harlem in 1925 with little more than a dollar to her name, Hurston rose to become one of the central figures of the Harlem Renaissance, only to die in obscurity. Not until the 1970s was she rediscovered by Alice Walker and other admirers. Although Hurston has entered the pantheon as one of the most influential American writers of the 20th century, the true nature of her personality has proven elusive. Now, a brilliant, complicated and utterly arresting woman emerges from this landmark book. Carla Kaplan, a noted Hurston scholar, has found hundreds of revealing, previously unpublished letters for this definitive collection; she also provides extensive and illuminating commentary on Hurston’s life and work, as well as an annotated glossary of the organizations and personalities that were important to it. From her enrollment at Baltimore’s Morgan Academy in 1917, to correspondence with Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings, Langston Hughes, Dorothy West and Alain Locke, to a final query letter to her publishers in 1959, Hurston’s spirited correspondence offers an invaluable portrait of a remarkable, irrepressible talent.

Download or read book Barracoon written by Zora Neale Hurston and published by HarperCollins. This book was released on 2018-05-08 with total page 211 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: One of the New York Times' Most Memorable Literary Moments of the Last 25 Years! • New York Times Bestseller • TIME Magazine’s Best Nonfiction Book of 2018 • New York Public Library’s Best Book of 2018 • NPR’s Book Concierge Best Book of 2018 • Economist Book of the Year • SELF.com’s Best Books of 2018 • Audible’s Best of the Year • BookRiot’s Best Audio Books of 2018 • The Atlantic’s Books Briefing: History, Reconsidered • Atlanta Journal Constitution, Best Southern Books 2018 • The Christian Science Monitor’s Best Books 2018 • “A profound impact on Hurston’s literary legacy.”—New York Times “One of the greatest writers of our time.”—Toni Morrison “Zora Neale Hurston’s genius has once again produced a Maestrapiece.”—Alice Walker A major literary event: a newly published work from the author of the American classic Their Eyes Were Watching God, with a foreword from Pulitzer Prize-winning author Alice Walker, brilliantly illuminates the horror and injustices of slavery as it tells the true story of one of the last-known survivors of the Atlantic slave trade—abducted from Africa on the last "Black Cargo" ship to arrive in the United States. In 1927, Zora Neale Hurston went to Plateau, Alabama, just outside Mobile, to interview eighty-six-year-old Cudjo Lewis. Of the millions of men, women, and children transported from Africa to America as slaves, Cudjo was then the only person alive to tell the story of this integral part of the nation’s history. Hurston was there to record Cudjo’s firsthand account of the raid that led to his capture and bondage fifty years after the Atlantic slave trade was outlawed in the United States. In 1931, Hurston returned to Plateau, the African-centric community three miles from Mobile founded by Cudjo and other former slaves from his ship. Spending more than three months there, she talked in depth with Cudjo about the details of his life. During those weeks, the young writer and the elderly formerly enslaved man ate peaches and watermelon that grew in the backyard and talked about Cudjo’s past—memories from his childhood in Africa, the horrors of being captured and held in a barracoon for selection by American slavers, the harrowing experience of the Middle Passage packed with more than 100 other souls aboard the Clotilda, and the years he spent in slavery until the end of the Civil War. Based on those interviews, featuring Cudjo’s unique vernacular, and written from Hurston’s perspective with the compassion and singular style that have made her one of the preeminent American authors of the twentieth-century, Barracoon masterfully illustrates the tragedy of slavery and of one life forever defined by it. Offering insight into the pernicious legacy that continues to haunt us all, black and white, this poignant and powerful work is an invaluable contribution to our shared history and culture.

Download or read book Wrapped in Rainbows written by Valerie Boyd and published by Simon and Schuster. This book was released on 2003 with total page 546 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Traces the career of the influential African-American writer, citing the historical backdrop of her life and work while considering her relationships with and influences on top literary, intellectual, and artistic figures.

Download or read book Zora Neale Hurston s Final Decade written by Virginia Lynn Moylan and published by . This book was released on 2011 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Moylan, founding member of the Fort Pierce, Fla., Annual Zora Festival, draws heavily on two texts (Valerie Boyd's biography Wrapped in Rainbows, and Carla Kaplan's edition of Hurston's letters, Zora Neale Hurston: A Life in Letters), supplemented by a number of interviews with the employers, acquaintances, and friends of Hurston's last decade. After a brief biographical sketch of Hurston's early years, Moylan addresses, the false child molestation charges that, even after they were recanted, left Hurston's reputation in tatters, and her very controversial (in Moylan's words, "eccentric") objections to Brown v. Board of Education and desegregation on the grounds that, in her perspective, "racial uplift" would come by individual effort alone. Hurston's final creative projects-her development of an "anthropologically correct" black baby doll and planned biography of King Herod attest to how the famously idiosyncratic and iconoclastic writer remained deeply unpredictable and fascinating, and that her "lost years" merit a thoughtful and thorough biography

Download or read book How It Feels to be Colored Me written by Zora Neale Hurston and published by Open Road Media. This book was released on 2024-01-01 with total page 10 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The acclaimed author of Their Eyes Were Watching God relates her experiences as an African American woman in early-twentieth-century America. In this autobiographical essay, author Zora Neale Hurston recounts episodes from her childhood in different communities in Florida: Eatonville and Jacksonville. She reflects on what those experiences showed her about race, identity, and feeling different. “How It Feels to Be Colored Me” was originally published in 1928 in the magazine The World Tomorrow.

Download or read book Their Eyes Were Watching God written by Zora Neale Hurston and published by . This book was released on 1937 with total page 159 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book Crossing the Creek written by Anna Lillios and published by . This book was released on 2010 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Drawing from interviews with people who knew both writers, as well as letters between them and other documented evidence of their meetings, Lillios (English, U. of Central Florida) offers an intriguing and in-depth study of the friendship between writers Zora Neale Hurston and Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings. She describes their complicated interracial friendship during the 1940s, when both were at the height of their fame and creativity and had published successful memoirs--Hurston's Dust Tracks on a Road and Rawlings' Cross Creek--following their novels Their Eyes Were Watching God and The Yearling, respectively. Focusing on the year 1942, when the two met, she describes the development of their friendship, the development of their writing craft that culminated in their masterpieces, their memoirs, and how they influenced each other as they struggled to complete their last creative works.

Download or read book Zora written by Judith Bloom Fradin and published by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. This book was released on 2012 with total page 197 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A biography of African American author Zora Neale Hurston.

Download or read book Hitting a Straight Lick with a Crooked Stick written by Zora Neale Hurston and published by HarperCollins. This book was released on 2020-01-14 with total page 304 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: From “one of the greatest writers of our time” (Toni Morrison)—the author of Barracoon and Their Eyes Were Watching God—a collection of remarkable stories, including eight “lost” Harlem Renaissance tales now available to a wide audience for the first time. New York Times’ Books to Watch for Buzzfeed’s Most Anticipated Books Newsweek’s Most Anticipated Books Forbes.com’s Most Anticipated Books E!’s Top Books to Read Glamour’s Best Books Essence’s Best Books by Black Authors In 1925, Barnard student Zora Neale Hurston—the sole black student at the college—was living in New York, “desperately striving for a toe-hold on the world.” During this period, she began writing short works that captured the zeitgeist of African American life and transformed her into one of the central figures of the Harlem Renaissance. Nearly a century later, this singular talent is recognized as one of the most influential and revered American artists of the modern period. Hitting a Straight Lick with a Crooked Stick is an outstanding collection of stories about love and migration, gender and class, racism and sexism that proudly reflect African American folk culture. Brought together for the first time in one volume, they include eight of Hurston’s “lost” Harlem stories, which were found in forgotten periodicals and archives. These stories challenge conceptions of Hurston as an author of rural fiction and include gems that flash with her biting, satiric humor, as well as more serious tales reflective of the cultural currents of Hurston’s world. All are timeless classics that enrich our understanding and appreciation of this exceptional writer’s voice and her contributions to America’s literary traditions.

Download or read book Mules and Men written by Zora Neale Hurston and published by Harper Collins. This book was released on 2009-10-13 with total page 372 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Zora Neale Hurston brings us Black America’s folklore as only she can, putting the oral history on the written page with grace and understanding. This new edition of Mules and Men features a new cover and a P.S. section which includes insights, interviews, and more. For the student of cultural history, Mules and Men is a treasury of Black America’s folklore as collected by Zora Neale Hurston, the storyteller and anthropologist who grew up hearing the songs and sermons, sayings and tall tales that have formed and oral history of the South since the time of slavery. Set intimately within the social context of Black life, the stories, “big old lies,” songs, voodoo customs, and superstitions recorded in these pages capture the imagination and bring back to life the humor and wisdom that is the unique heritage of Black Americans.

Download or read book Zora Neale Hurston s Their Eyes Were Watching God written by Cheryl A. Wall and published by Oxford University Press, USA. This book was released on 2000 with total page 206 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The rediscovery of Zora Neale Hurston's Their Eyes Were Watching God, first published in 1937 but subsequently out-of-print for decades, marks one of the most dramatic chapters in African-American literature and Women's Studies. Its popularity owes much to the lyricism of the prose, the pitch-perfect rendition of black vernacular English, and the memorable characters--most notably, Janie Crawford. Collecting the most widely cited and influential essays published on Hurston's classic novel over the last quarter century, this Casebook presents contesting viewpoints by Hazel Carby, Henry Louis Gates, Jr., Barbara Johnson, Carla Kaplan, Daphne Lamothe, Mary Helen Washington, and Sherley Anne Williams. The volume also includes a statement Hurston submitted to a reference book on twentieth-century authors in 1942. As it records the major debates the novel has sparked on issues of language and identity, feminism and racial politics, A Casebook charts new directions for future critics and affirms the classic status of the novel.

Download or read book Zora Neale Hurston American Literary Culture written by Margaret Genevieve West and published by . This book was released on 2005 with total page 300 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Genevieve West examines the cultural history of Zora Neale Hurston’s writing and the reception of her work, in an attempt to explain why Hurston died in obscure poverty only to be reclaimed as an important Harlem Renaissance writer decades after her death. Unlike other books on Hurston, this study focuses on how Hurston was marketed and reviewed during her career and how literary scholars reappraised her after her death. While her publisher's approach to marketing Hurston as an African American fiction writer and folklorist increased her popularity among the general reading public, her fellow Harlem Renaissance authors often excoriated her as an exploiter of African American culture and a propagator of black stereotypes. Eventually, the criticism outweighed the popularity, and her writing fell out of fashion. It was only after critics reconsidered her work in the 1960s and 1970s that she eventually regained her status as one of the best writers of her generation. No other book has focused on this aspect of Hurston's career, nor has any book so systematically used marketing materials and reviews to track Hurston's literary reputation. As a result, West's study will provide a new perspective on Hurston and on the ways that the politics of race, class, and gender impact canon formation in American literary culture. This study is based on numerous interviews, short fiction previously undocumented in Hurston scholarship, an innovative analysis of advertisements and dust jackets, examinations of letters by and about Hurston, and the examination of historical/literary contexts, including the Harlem Renaissance, the protest movement, the assimilationist movement, the Black Arts movement, and the rise of black feminist thought.

Download or read book Zora Neale Hurston written by Zora Neale Hurston and published by Rutgers University Press. This book was released on 2008-06-03 with total page 425 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Though she died penniless and forgotten, Zora Neale Hurston is now recognized as a major figure in African American literature. Best known for her 1937 novel Their Eyes Were Watching God, she also published numerous short stories and essays, three other novels, and two books on black folklore. Even avid readers of Hurston’s prose, however, may be surprised to know that she was also a serious and ambitious playwright throughout her career. Although several of her plays were produced during her lifetime—and some to public acclaim—they have languished in obscurity for years. Even now, most critics and historians gloss over these texts, treating them as supplementary material for understanding her novels. Yet, Hurston’s dramatic works stand on their own merits and independently of her fiction. Now, eleven of these forgotten dramatic writings are being published together for the first time in this carefully edited and annotated volume. Filled with lively characters, vibrant images of rural and city life, biblical and folk tales, voodoo, and, most importantly, the blues, readers will discover a “real Negro theater” that embraces all the richness of black life.

Download or read book Fire The Zora Neale Hurston Story written by Peter Bagge and published by Drawn & Quarterly. This book was released on 2021-04-29 with total page 112 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A bold retelling of the life of the Their Eyes Were Watching God author Peter Bagge has defied the expectations of the comics industry by changing gears from his famous slacker hero Buddy Bradley to documenting the life and times of historical 20th century trailblazers. If Bagge had not already had a New York Times bestseller with his biography of Margaret Sanger, his newest biography, Fire!! The Zora Neale Hurston Story, would seem to be an unfathomable pairing of author and subject. Yet through Bagge’s skilled cartooning, he turns what could be a rote biography into a bold and dazzling graphic novel, creating a story as brilliant as the life itself. Hurston challenged the norms of what was expected of an African American woman in early 20th century society. The fifth of eight kids from a Baptist family in Alabama, Hurston’s writing prowess blossomed at Howard University, and then Barnard College, where she was the sole black student. She arrived in NYC at the height of the Harlem Renaissance and quickly found herself surrounded by peers such as Langston Hughes and Wallace Thurman. Hurston went on to become a noted folklorist and critically acclaimed novelist, including her most provocative work Their Eyes Were Watching God. Despite these landmark achievements, personal tragedies and shifting political winds in the midcentury rendered her almost forgotten by the end of her life. With admiration and respect, Bagge reconstructs her vivid life in resounding full-colour.

Download or read book The Nation s Region written by Leigh Anne Duck and published by University of Georgia Press. This book was released on 2009 with total page 356 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: How could liberalism and apartheid coexist for decades in our country, as they did during the first half of the twentieth century? This study looks at works by such writers as Thomas Dixon, Erskine Caldwell, Zora Neale Hurston, William Faulkner, and Ralph Ellison to show how representations of time in southern narrative first accommodated but finally elucidated the relationship between these two political philosophies. Although racial segregation was codified by U.S. law, says Leigh Anne Duck, nationalist discourse downplayed its significance everywhere but in the South, where apartheid was conceded as an immutable aspect of an anachronistic culture. As the nation modernized, the South served as a repository of the country's romantic notions: the region was represented as a close-knit, custom-bound place through which the nation could temper its ambivalence about the upheavals of progress. The Great Depression changed this. Amid economic anxiety and the international rise of fascism, writes Duck, "the trope of the backward South began to comprise an image of what the United States could become." As she moves from the Depression to the nascent years of the civil rights movement to the early cold war era, Duck explains how experimental writers in each of these periods challenged ideas of a monolithically archaic South through innovative representations of time. She situates their narratives amid broad concern regarding national modernization and governance, as manifest in cultural and political debates, sociological studies, and popular film. Although southern modernists' modes and methods varied along this trajectory, their purpose remained focused: to explore the mutually constitutive relationships between social forms considered "southern" and "national."

Download or read book The Chase and Ruins written by Sharony Green and published by JHU Press. This book was released on 2023-10-03 with total page 192 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "The author recovers an understudied but important period in Zora Neale Hurston's life: her 1947-48 stay in Honduras. Hurston - an anthropologist by training - was officially searching for a "lost" Maya ruin. But the author argues that Hurston was also engaged in a much more personal project: in escaping the Jim Crow south to Central America, she was able to sidestep wearying conversations about race in the United States, while still embracing her privilege (and power) as a citizen of the United States in postwar Central America"--