Curriculum Resources
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Hurston: Folklore, Memoirs, and Other Writings
This collection includes
Mules and Men
Tell My Horse (based on fieldwork in Haiti)
Dust Tracks on a Road
Selected Articles
Review:
Library of America's companion to Hurston's Novels and Stories presents her nonfiction work, which is perhaps less familiar but no less important than her fiction in the body of black literature. This is the first time the unexpurgated version of her 1942 autobiography, Dust Tracks on the Road, is being published; sections deemed too provocative (dealing with politics, race, and sex) have been restored. Mules and Men (1935) is a collection of African American folklore she gleaned on travels in the South, while Tell My Horse (1938) tenders her personal findings on African-based religion in Jamaica and Haiti. Additionally, 22 magazine and book articles with anthropological themes (Hurston did graduate work in that field) that have never been gathered into book form are corralled here. As readers only familiar with her fiction will discover, she couches her nonfiction in the same visceral yet poetic style--for instance, this quote from Dust Tracks: "It seems to me that trying to live without friends is like milking a bear to get cream for your morning coffee. It is a whole lot of trouble, and then not worth much after you get it." It will never be easier to acquire a complete set of Hurston's nonfiction than now. Brad Hooper