glasspasob.blogg.se - Zora neale hurston most famous books

‘How Beautiful We Were’: Imbolo Mbue’s second novel is a tale of a casually sociopathic corporation and the people whose lives it steamrolls.

When Hurston was quoted (misquoted, she insisted) as claiming that Jim Crow worked, Wilkins quickly launched a counteroffensive, labeling her a wisecracking publicity hound who sold out her people in order to sell books.Įditors at The Times Book Review selected the best fiction and nonfiction titles of the year. Wright, who was committed to art for protest's sake, accused Hurston of putting on a minstrel show in print that played to the tastes of white audiences. scorned what they saw as her old-folks-at-home hunky-doryism at a time when the living was anything but easy for colored people. White critics of her day praised her ''authentic'' renderings of ''primitive'' Negro life, even as many black intellectuals - including her fellow writers Sterling Brown and Richard Wright, and Roy Wilkins of the N.A.A.C.P. At the height of her career in the 1930's, she was simultaneously acclaimed and denounced for her attention to the vernacular.

Of course, Hurston's work has inspired as much ranting as raving. In addition to the fiction and folklore for which she is best known, she wrote, produced, directed and performed in plays, musical revues and folk concerts that toured the country, including ''The Great Day,'' which received rave reviews when it opened on Broadway in 1932 with a retinue of Bahamian fire dancers.

She also published an autobiography, ''Dust Tracks on a Road'' (1942) four novels, including her much-lauded folk opera of black female development, ''Their Eyes Were Watching God'' (1937), which today is considered a feminist classic and close to 100 short stories, essays and articles, most centered on black folk culture, ''the Negro farthest down,'' as she put it. Trained in anthropology at Barnard and Columbia, she did pioneering ethnographic fieldwork in the Caribbean and the rural South in the 20's, 30's and 40's, publishing two important collections of folk tales based on her research, ''Mules and Men'' (1935) and ''Tell My Horse'' (1938). Most often associated with the Harlem Renaissance, the black cultural revolution of the 1920's, Hurston, a country girl from the ''pure Negro town'' of Eatonville, Fla., did go on to have a productive, if not entirely brilliant, career - more than one, in fact. A devoted daughter of the rural South, she was, on the one hand, a fierce cultural nationalist who championed the black folk at every turn of the page, and on the other a political conservative who declared in print that slavery was the price she paid for civilization and famously opposed the Supreme Court's 1954 school desegregation decision. She was a lightning rod of contradiction and controversy. Confident to the point of conceit, she was by most accounts a flamboyant, infinitely inventive chameleon of a woman, who could make herself equally at home among the Haitian voodoo doctors who informed her research and the Park Avenue patrons who financed it. Her words have all the arrogance, optimism and innocence of youth, although some might argue that, whether 16 or 60, Hurston was never innocent. She was 37 years old but passing for a good 10 years younger. I do not belong to the sobbing school of Negrohood who hold that nature somehow has given them a lowdown dirty deal and whose feelings are all hurt about it.'' When Zora Neale Hurston published what is arguably her most famous essay, ''How It Feels to Be Colored Me,'' in 1928, she was at the beginning of what she no doubt hoped would be a brilliant career.