New York, NY: Amistad (January 2022)

Hardback.

As new in dust jacket.

Introduction by New York Times bestselling author Henry Louis Gates Jr.

Spanning more than 35 years of work, the first comprehensive collection of essays, criticism, and articles by the legendary author of the Harlem Renaissance, Zora Neale Hurston, showcasing the evolution of her distinctive style as an archivist and author.

“One of the greatest writers of our time.”—Toni Morrison

One of the most acclaimed artists of the Harlem Renaissance, Zora Neale Hurston was a gifted novelist, playwright, and essayist. Drawn from three decades of her work, this anthology showcases her development as a writer, from her early pieces expounding on the beauty and precision of African American art to some of her final published works, covering the sensational trial of Ruby McCollum, a wealthy Black woman convicted in 1952 for killing a white doctor. Among the selections are Hurston’s well-known works such as “How It Feels to be Colored Me” and “My Most Humiliating Jim Crow Experience.”

The essays in this essential collection are grouped thematically and cover a panoply of topics, including politics, race and gender, and folkloric study from the height of the Harlem Renaissance to the early years of the Civil Rights movement. Demonstrating the breadth of this revered and influential writer’s work, You Don't Know Us Negroes and Other Essays is an invaluable chronicle of a writer’s development and a window into her world and time.

Zora Neale Hurston (1891–1960) was a novelist, folklorist, dramatist, ethnographer, and cultural anthropologist. Her many books include Jonah’s Gourd Vine; Mules and Men; Seraph on the Suwanee; Moses, Man of the Mountain; The Collected Stories; Every Tongue Got to Confess; Barracoon; and Dust Tracks on a Road. She is also the author of the bestselling classic Their Eyes Were Watching God.

Henry Louis Gates, Jr. is the author of the instant New York Times bestseller The Black Church, and an American literary critic, professor, historian, filmmaker, and public intellectual. He serves as the Alphonse Fletcher University Professor and Director of the Hutchins Center for African and African American Research at Harvard University, and is the executive producer and host of the PBS series Finding Your Roots.

M. Genevieve West is Professor of English and Chair of the Department of English, Speech, and Foreign Languages at Texas Woman’s University. A scholar of Zora Neale Hurston’s work, West has contributed to prestigious academic journals such as African American Review, Amerikastudien/American Studies, Receptions, and Women’s Studies. She is the author of one work of literary criticism, Zora Neale Hurston and American Literary Culture, and the editor of Hurston's Harlem Renaissance short stories Hitting a Straight Lick with a Crooked Stick.