If you ever want proof that the canon is poltically determined, the fact that Hurston’s work fell out of print and out of favor in the 1960s and 1970s is proof of it.  This happened largely because Hurston tended to be “politically incorrect”.  A lifelong conservative, in later life, she worked actively for such nationally known conservatives a Florida Senator George Smathers and Ohio Presidential Candidate Robert Taft.

Throughout her career she chose to attack “the sobbing school of Negrohood” which saw all black action as a pathological response to white opression.  Instead she tended to celebrate both African American folk-culture (often buried as embarrassing by leading African American “Race leaders” of the time) and individual acheivement.

Much of this had to with her upbringing in Eatonville Florida, one of the oldest all-black cities in the nation.  Hurston, in addition to her excellent novels was also an accomplished folklorist collecting incredible first-hand accounts of voodo practices in Haiti and Jamaica as well as examples of southern black folk culture in the states. Of all the writers of the so-called “Harlem Renaissance” Hurston, both personally and in her literary work, seems closest to her southern roots.

A good place to start one’s reading of Hurston is Their Eyes Were Watching God, which is almost universally hailed as her best book.  I am also a big fan of her remarkable autobiography, Dust Tracks on the Road, though one should be warned that it contains a good deal of fiction as well as fact.  Jonah’s Goard Vine is also an excellent Hurston Novel

However, the Novel most indicative of Hurston’s ambitions to break out of a “ghetto” of black literature which she at times found stifling was Seraph on the Suwanee, a novel whose main characters were white “Florida Crackers” The novel, which has largely been ignored or dismissed by Hurston’s critical followers is one of Hurston’s central statement of sympathy with characters who were men as well as women white as well as black.  While the novel has definite shortcomings it is nonetheless a remarkable statement by a remarkable woman.  Zora Neale Hurston died largely forgotten in a Florida Nursing home in 1963 and was buried in an unmarked grave.  Her grave was found, and then marked by Alice Walker, who considered Hurston her hero, an experience which she described in a Seminal mid 1970s article in Ms. Magazine.  This article marked the beginning of the Hurston revival, led by feminist and afro-american critics.