Public domain photo of Zora Neale Hurston, by Carl Van Vechten

Zora Neale Hurston (1891-1960)

A selective list of online literary criticism for the African American writer Zora Neale Hurston, favoring signed articles by recognized scholars and articles published in peer-reviewed sources

main page | 20th-century literature | African American literature | 20th-century women writers

biography & introduction

Their Eyes Were Watching God. Selected for "The Big Read," Erika Koss, editor. Contents: Readers Guide contains Introduction, Historical Context, About the Author, Other Works/Adaptations, Discussion Questions, Bibliography; Teacher's Guide contains Schedule/Lesson Plans, Capstone Project Ideas, Essay Topics; and an audio radio program. National Endowment for the Arts.

Howard, Lillie P. "Zora Neale Hurston." An extended biography of Hurston, includes a list of her books, from Gale Publishers.

"Zora Neale Hurston." A profile of Hurston from the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture at the New York Public Library.

"The Zora Neale Hurston Plays at the Library of Congress." Presentation on Hurston from the Library of Congress, includes a timeline, photos of Hurston, and scanned images of several of her plays.

"Zora Neale Hurston." An introduction to Hurston from Voices From the Gaps, Women Writers of Color, a web project at the Univ. of Minnesota.

Johnson, Yvonne. "Zora Neale Hurston." An introduction to Hurston from the Literary Encyclopedia, 04 March 2005 [subscription service].

literary criticism

Batker, Carol. "'Love me like I like to be': the sexual politics of Hurston's Their Eyes Were Watching God, the classic blues and the Black Women's Club movement." African American Review (Summer 1998).

Burrows, Stuart. "'Your heard her, you ain't blind': Seeing what's said in Their Eyes Were Watching God. Novel: A Forum on Fiction 34 (Summer 2001) [first page only, blurred].

Carme, Manuel. "Mule Bone: Langston Hughes and Zora Neale Hurston's dream deferred of an African-American theatre of the black word." African American Review 35 (Spring 2001).

Ciuba, Gary. "The worm against the word: The hermeneutical challenge in Hurston's Jonah's Gourd Vine. On Hurston as a "preacher," beginning with her first novel. African American Review 34 (Spring 2000).

Clarke, Deborah. "'The porch couldn't talk for looking': Voice and vision in Their Eyes Were Watching God. African American Review 35 (Winter 2001).

Daley, Christine. "A Rocky Road to Posterity: The Publication of Zora Neale Hurston." A reception study of Zora Neale Hurston. Says Prof. Daley, "Hurston, a controversial figure in her own time, has proved to be a touchstone of modern reception of both African-American literature and unconventional writing by women." Womenwriters.net.

Davis, Doris. "'De Talkin' Game': The Creation of Psychic Space in Selected Short Fiction of Zora Neale Hurston." Tulsa Studies in Women's Literature 26 (Fall 2007).

English, Daylanne K. "Somebody Else's Foremother: David Haynes and Zora Neale Hurston." African American Review 33 (Summer 1999).

Emery, Amy Fass. "The Zombie in/as the text: Zora Neale Hurston's Tell My Horse" [republished as Voodoo Gods. An Inquiry into Native Myths and Magic in Jamaica and Haiti ]. African American Review Fall 2005.

Hoffman-Jeep, Lynda. "Creating Ethnography: Zora Neale Hurston and Lydia Cabrera." African American Review 39 (Fall 2005).

Jackson, Chuck. Waste and Whiteness: Zora Neale Hurston and the Politics of Eugenics [on Jonah's Gourd Vine (1934), "Gilded Six-Bits" (1933), and "Sweat" (1926)] African American Review Winter 2000.

Jirousek, Lori. "'That Commonality of Feeling': Hurston, Hybridity, and Ethnography." African American Review 38 (Fall 2004).

Johnson, Maria V. "'The world in a jug and the stopper in hand':'Their Eyes' as blues performance." [Their Eyes Were Watching God]. African American Review Fall 1998.

Plant, Deborah G. A review of Ayana Karanja Zora Neale Hurston: The Breath of Her Voice (Lang 1999). African American Review Spring 2002.

Pavlic, Edward M. "'Papa Legba, Ouvrier Barriere Por Moi Passer': Esu in Their Eyes & Zora Neale Hurston's Diasporic Modernism." African American Review 38 (Spring 2004).

Simmons, Ryan. "'The hierarchy itself': Hurston's Their Eyes Were Watching God and the sacrifice of narrative authority." African American Review 36 (Summer 2002).

Thompson, Mark Christian. "National Socialism and Blood-Sacrifice in Zora Neale Hurston's Moses, Man of the Mountain. African American Review 38 (Fall 2004).

Trefzer, Annette. "Possessing the Self: Caribbean Identities in Zora Neale Hurston's Tell My Horse." African American Review (Summer 2000).

Trombold, John. "The Minstrel Show Goes to the Great War: Zora Neale Hurston's Mass Cultural Other." MELUS (Spring 1999) [first page only].

Walker, Pierre A. "Zora Neale Hurston and the post-modern self in Dust Tracks on a Road." African American Review (Fall 1998).

English, Daylanne K. A review of Cheryl A. Wall, ed. Zora Neale Hurston's Their Eyes Were Watching God: A Casebook (Oxford UP 2000). African American Review (Winter 2001).

Weathers, Glenda B. "Biblical trees, biblical deliverance: literary landscapes of Zora Neale Hurston and Toni Morrison." African American Review (Spring-Summer 2005).

teaching materials

Teachers resources for Their Eyes Were Watching God created by C-Span for their 2002 American Writers II series.

"Folktales of Zora Neale Hurston." A guide for teaching Zora Neale Hurston, from the Yale-New Haven Teachers Institute.

Web site for Tulsa Studies in Women's Literature. A scholarly journal devoted to the study of women's literature of all periods and nationalities.

main page | 20th-century literature | African American literature | 20th-century women writers

1998-2012 by Jan Pridmore