Jonah's Gourd Vine, Mules and Men, Their Eyes Were Watching God

New York, NY: Quality Paperback Books. Very Good. 1990. Book Club Edition. Paperback. Very Good+ in Wraps: shows a small dampstain at the lower corner of the front endpaper; a couple of very small stains at the top edge; the faintest thumbing to the fore-edge; the binsing leans a little and is very slightly concave; a crease near the upper corner of the front panel; else flawless; the binding is secure; the text is clean. Free of creases to the backstrip. Free of any creased or dog-eared pages in the text. Free of any underlining, hi-lighting or marginalia or marks in the text. Free of ownership names, dates, addresses, notations, inscriptions, stamps, or labels. A handsome, carefully-used copy, structurally sound and tightly bound, showing minor, unobtrusive imperfections. NOT a Remainder or Ex-Library. 8vo. (8 x 5.35 x 1.7 inches) . Foreward to 'Jonah's Gourd Vine' by Rita Dove. New Foreward to 'Mules and Men' by Arnold Rampersad. Preface by Franz Boas. Duotone illustrations by Miguel Covarrubias. Foreward to 'Thier Eyes Were Watching God' by Mary Helen Washington. Language: English. Weight: 25.5 ounces. Paperback. At the height of the Harlem Renaissance during the 1930s, Zora Neale Hurston was the preeminent black woman writer in the United States. She was a sometime-collaborator with Langston Hughes and a fierce rival of Richard Wright. Her stories appeared in major magazines, she consulted on Hollywood screenplays, and she penned four novels, an autobiography, countless essays, and two books on black mythology. Yet by the late 1950s, Hurston was living in obscurity, working as a maid in a Florida hotel. She died in 1960 in a Welfare home, was buried in an unmarked grave, and quickly faded from literary consciousness until 1975 when Alice Walker almost single-handedly revived interest in her work. Of Hurston's fiction, Their Eyes Were Watching God is arguably the best-known and perhaps the most controversial. Jonah's Gourd Vine was Hurston's 1934 debut novel. The novel is a semi-autobiographical novel following John Buddy Pearson and his wife, Lucy. The novel recounts the experiences of Black life in the post-Reconstruction era. Hurston explores themes including marital dysfunction, generational trauma, and testimony. The novel has many depictions of violence, often domestic in nature. The presence of violence represents the nature of race relations at the time and how it impacts social interactions. Many key events in the plot revolve around marriage and divorce. This is related to the theme of trauma. The novel received largely favorable reviews, many of which were attributed to Hurston's use of dialect and folklore. This novel reflects the ideas and elements which Hurston focuses on in her following novels. Mules and Men is a 1935 autoethnographical collection of African-American folklore collected and written by Hurston. The book embraces both her own re-immersion in the folklore of her childhood, and a desire to document those traditions as part of the emergent anthropological sciences. Subsequently, the book has been described as an important text for the canonization of Hurston in both American and African-American literature, and in developing fields such as ethnography and critical race theory. ; 8vo 8" - 9" tall; lii, 698 pages .