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Zora Neale HurstonA modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more. For select classroom titles, we also provide Teaching Guides with discussion and quiz questions to prompt student engagement.
Zora Neale Hurston published Their Eyes Were Watching God in 1937 during the Great Depression and long after the 1920s height of the Harlem Renaissance, an artistic and cultural movement during which Black artists asserted their right to self-representation. Nevertheless, Hurston, who was an active writer in Harlem in the 1920s, expanded the umbrella of the Harlem Renaissance to cover not only Black lives in the Northeast and Mid-Atlantic but also the South.
During the Harlem Renaissance, writers and artists sought to celebrate the beauty, creativity, and originality of African American culture. Writers like W. E. B. DuBois and Alain Locke saw these artistic contributions as proof that African Americans were full citizens during an era when Jim Crow laws and mob violence prevented the full exercise of their rights. Some artists and critics who embraced the political program of the Harlem Renaissance felt pressure to present positive images to white audiences in an effort to transform the image of Black Americans from the rural, uneducated stereotype that dominated the white imagination. Of particular importance was changing the representation of Black women from either the sexless enslaved “Mammies” or promiscuous “Jezebels” who tempted virtuous white men into sin.
By Zora Neale Hurston
Barracoon: The Story of the Last "Black Cargo"
Zora Neale Hurston
Drenched in Light
Zora Neale Hurston
Dust Tracks on a Road
Zora Neale Hurston
Hitting a Straight Lick with a Crooked Stick
Zora Neale Hurston
How It Feels To Be Colored Me
Zora Neale Hurston
Jonah's Gourd Vine
Zora Neale Hurston
Moses, Man of the Mountain
Zora Neale Hurston
Mule Bone: A Comedy of Negro Life
Langston Hughes, Zora Neale Hurston
Mules and Men
Zora Neale Hurston
Seraph on the Suwanee
Zora Neale Hurston
Spunk
Zora Neale Hurston
Sweat
Zora Neale Hurston
Tell My Horse: Voodoo and Life in Haiti and Jamaica
Zora Neale Hurston
The Eatonville Anthology
Zora Neale Hurston
The Gilded Six-Bits
Zora Neale Hurston