Average Reviews:
(More customer reviews)This book and its companion from the library of america, have everything that Hurston wrote - except some unedited manuscripts, and some articles and short stories.
Her interest in language, folklore and ritual, and the cult of local color comes through in all of her works. The personalities and struggles, failures and victories of all of her characters become real for the reader.
She is writing earlier in the 20th century, when people were starting to buy radios and automobiles -- she saw a lot of the south, and north, rapidly transform into the beginnings of the consumer culture we know today.
When I read Hurston, it is like I feel an anxiety to preserve. I sense a underlying insight, that she probably had, that within a couple of generations, the rhythm of life would radically change.
I think she saw that a lot of the folk traditions and rituals in North America would disappear, so she did what she could to demonstrate a vibrant african american cultural life, as she knew it, and interpreted it.
The two collections of Hurston's work show the span of her writing, over her lifetime. These pieces reveal how many of her imagination and many of her themes and character-types evolve over the years.
I recommend the two volumes.
Click Here to see more reviews about: Zora Neale Hurston : Folklore, Memoirs, and Other Writings : Mules and Men, Tell My Horse, Dust Tracks on a Road, Selected Articles (The Library of America, 75)
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