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Zora Neale Hurston's Mules and Men book cover
Zora Neale Hurston's Mules and Men
1999
First Published
4.09
Average Rating
97
Number of Pages

Acclaimed by celebrated folklorist Alan Lomax as 'the most engaging, genuine and skillfully written book in the filed of folklore.' This is Hurston's first great collection of African American tales, songs and sayings. For the student of cultural history—or anyone who loves a good story well told—this treasury captures the imagination as only great literature can.

Avg Rating
4.09
Number of Ratings
11
5 STARS
36%
4 STARS
36%
3 STARS
27%
2 STARS
0%
1 STARS
0%
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Authors

Zora Neale Hurston
Zora Neale Hurston
Author · 43 books

Novels, including Their Eyes Were Watching God (1937), and nonfiction writings of American folklorist Zora Neale Hurston give detailed accounts of African American life in the South. In 1925, Hurston, one of the leaders of the literary renaissance, happening in Harlem, produced the short-lived literary magazine Fire!! alongside Langston Hughes and Wallace Thurman shortly before she entered Barnard College. This literary movement developed into the Harlem renaissance. Hurston applied her Barnard ethnographic training to document African American folklore in her critically acclaimed book Mules and Men alongside fiction Their Eyes Were Watching God . She also assembled a folk-based performance dance group that recreated her Southern tableau with one performance on Broadway. People awarded a Guggenheim fellowship to Hurston to travel to Haiti and conduct research on conjure in 1937. Her significant work ably broke into the secret societies and exposed their use of drugs to create the Vodun trance, also a subject of study for fellow dancer-anthropologist Katherine Dunham, then at the University of Chicago. In 1954, the Pittsburgh Courier assigned Hurston, unable to sell her fiction, to cover the small-town murder trial of Ruby McCollum, the prosperous black wife of the local lottery racketeer, who had killed a racist white doctor. Hurston also contributed to Woman in the Suwanee County Jail , a book by journalist and civil rights advocate William Bradford Huie.

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