Bloom, Harold, ed. Zora Neale Hurston's Their Eyes Were Watching God. Modern Critical Interpretations. Philadelphia, PA: Chelsea House Publishers, 1987. Bloom collects some of the best and most revelatory scholarship then available for Hurston's best-known novel. Contributors include Robert Stepto, Lorraine Bethel, Barbara Johnson, and Henry Louis Gates, Jr.
Bordelon, Pamela, ed. Go Gator and Muddy the Water: Writings by Zora Neale Hurston from the Federal Writers' Project. New York: W. W. Norton, 1999. The volume collects Hurston's work products and oral history materials from her Federal Writers' Project experiences during the 1930s; many of the materials are published here for the first time. They are particularly useful as source material for Their Eyes Were Watching God.
Boyd, Valerie. Wrapped in Rainbows: The Life of Zora Neale Hurston. New York: Scribner's, 2003. Boyd's work reigns as the most comprehensive assessment of the author's life.
Cronin, Gloria L., ed. Critical Essays on Zora Neale Hurston. New York: G. K. Hall & Co., 1998. The volume includes some contemporaneous reviews of Hurston's works that are not included in the earlier volume by Gates and Appiah (referenced below), along with several new essays. See especially the essays by Wall and St. Clair.
Davis, Rose Parkman. Zora Neale Hurston: An Annotated Bibliography and Reference Guide. Boston, MA: G. K. Hall, 1997. This volume's significance is made obvious by its title.
Gates, Henry Louis, and Kwame, Anthony Appiah, eds. Zora Neale Hurston: Critical Perspectives Past and Present. New York: Amistad, 1987. The comprehensive nature of the volume is what made it unique in 1993. Gates and Appiah collected contemporaneous reviews and the best essays on Hurston available at the time. Readers should take special note of Françoise Lionnet-McCumber's essay on Dust Tracks on a Road.
Glassman, Steve, and Kathryn, Lee Seidel, eds. Zora in Florida. Orlando, FL: University of Central Florida Press, 1991. The unique essays in this volume explore Florida as setting and backdrop for Hurston's life philosophy and literary works.
Harris, Trudier. The Power of the Porch: The Storyteller's Craft in Zora Neale Hurston, Gloria Naylor, and Randall Kenan. Athens, GA: University of Georgia Press, 1996. Harris's work explores storytelling in Hurston's Mules and Men, and connects her use of storytelling as narrative strategy to a rich tradition in African American life and culture.
Hemenway, Robert. Zora Neale Hurston: A Literary Biography. Chicago and Urbana, IL: University of Illinois Press, 1980. Until Valerie Boyd's 2003 biography of Hurston appeared, Hemenway's work was the first serious and most thorough treatment of Hurston's life and work.
Holloway, Karla. The Character of the Word: The Texts of Zora Neale Hurston. New York: Greenwood Press, 1987. Holloway explores Hurston's works through the lenses of formal Linguistics and African American spiritual traditions.
Howard, Lillie P., ed. Alice Walker and Zora Neale Hurston: The Common Bond. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1993. Howard collects essays by Alice Walker, Trudier Harris, Ann Folwell Stanford, Ayana Karanja, and others. The volume's significance is apparent in its title; the essays examine intertextual and extratextual linkages between Hurston and Alice Walker, the woman who was instrumental in resurrecting Hurston as literary foremother for succeeding generations of African American women writers.
Hurston, Anne. Speak, So You Can Speak Again: The Life of Zora Neale Hurston. New York: Doubleday, 2004. A Hurston family descendant has compiled a unique collection of memorabilia that includes numerous photographs, replicas of handwritten notes, and other documents from the author's life that readers will find fascinating. The material is presented along with an intimate sketch of the author's personal life.
Hurston, Zora Neale. Every Tongue Got to Confess: Negro Folk-Tales from the Gulf States. Fwd. John Edgar Wideman; Introd. Carla Kaplan. New York: HarperCollins, 2001. The volume features folk tales from Hurston's field notes as she took them down while traveling through the south on an anthropology fellowship. It is a wonderful supplement to Mules and Men.
Kaplan, Carla, ed. Zora Neale Hurston: A Life in Letters. New York: Doubleday, 2002. Kaplan has collected letters Hurston wrote to her many friends and associates from the 1920s through the 1950s. In many cases, the letters provide insight into the motivations of a woman who often obscured her private self.
Lester, Neal A.Understanding Zora Neale Hurston's Their Eyes Were Watching God: A Student Casebook to Issues, Sources, and Historical Documents. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1999. Lester's book provides useful and essential materials for a deeper contextual engagement with Hurston's most popular work.
Lowe, John. Jump at the Sun: Zora Neale Hurston's Cosmic Comedy. Chicago and Urbana, IL: University of Illinois Press, 1994. Lowe's seminal work showcases the function of humor in African American literature and culture generally and specifically in Hurston's longer fiction. Lowe's reading of Seraph on the Suwanee is particularly revealing in regard to Arvay Meserve's lack of “mother wit”.
Meisenhelder, Susan Edwards. Hitting a Straight Lick with a Crooked Stick: Race and Gender in the Work of Zora Neale Hurston. Tuscaloosa, AL: University of Alabama Press, 1999. Using the folk euphemism for making the best of a bad situation as a rubric, Meisenhelder's work reveals the subversive nature of Hurston's literary projects and her objective of liberating women from patriarchal constraints and limited gender roles. Her reading of Seraph on the Suwanee is particularly valuable.
Peters, Pearlie. The Assertive Woman in Zora Neale Hurston's Fiction, Folklore, and Drama. New York: Routledge, 1998. The volume explores the evolution of the individualist spirit and the assertive woman's voice in Hurston's work. Significantly, Peters includes analyses of some of Hurston's seldom-assessed dramatic works.
Plant, Deborah G.Every Tub Must Sit on Its Own Bottom: The Philosophy and Politics of Zora Neale Hurston. Urbana and Chicago, IL: University of Illinois Press, 1995. The one volume devoted specifically and pointedly to Hurston's philosophy and politics. Using the folk euphemism for self-reliance and self-determination as a rubric, Plant connects Hurston's thinking to Nietzsche, Spinoza, Booker T. Washington, and others, which significantly aids our understanding of Hurston's politics, influences, and motivations.
Plant, Deborah G.Zora Neale Hurston: A Biography of the Spirit. Westport, CT: Praeger, 2007. The most recent biography of Hurston examines the author's spiritual development and how it propelled her extraordinary life achievements.
Walker, Alice. In Search of Our Mothers' Gardens: Womanist Prose. New York: Harcourt Brace and Company, 1983. Walker details her role in resurrecting Hurston as a literary foremother. Walker was instrumental in moving Hurston to the center of the canon of African American women's literature.
Wall, Cheryl. Women of the Harlem Renaissance. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1995. Wall uses the lenses of race and gender to offer an incisive assessment of Hurston's work alongside that of several of her contemporary women writers during the Harlem Renaissance.
Wall, Cheryl ed. Their Eyes Were Watching God: A Casebook, New York: Oxford University Press, 2000. Wall has collected essential readings for understanding Hurston's best-known work. Readers should note especially Daphne Lamothe's essay on Voodoo imagery in the novel.
West, M. Genevieve. Zora Neale Hurston & American Literary Culture. Gainesville, FL: University Press of Florida, 2005. The volume contains an incisive, sustained, comprehensive analysis of circumstances contributing to contemporaneous receptions of each of Hurston's works.
Zora Neale Hurston annual festival site: http://www.zoranealehurstonfestival.com. The site contains information and photographs about Hurston, African American culture, and the annual Zora Neale Hurston festival in Eatonville, Florida.
