Hurston’s novel – regarded as one of the most important and enduring American classics of the 20th century – follows the fortunes of Janie Crawford, a light-skinned, long-haired woman who was married three times and had been tried for the murder of one of her husbands in the Black town of Eaton, Florida.

This Southern love story, first printed in 1937, was out of print for almost thirty years—due largely to initial audiences’ rejection of its strong Black female protagonist. Since its 1978 reissue, Hurston’s book has become perhaps the most widely read and highly acclaimed novel in the entire canon of African-American literature.

This 75th Anniversary Edition includes a foreword by Haitian-American storyteller Edwidge Danticat and an afterword by American historian Henry Louis Gates, Jr.

Condition

Good

About the Author

Zora Neale Hurston (1891-1960) was a novelist, folklorist, and anthropologist.

Hurston was born on January 7, 1891, in Notasulga, Alabama, and grew up in Eatonville, Florida. She attended Howard University, Barnard College and Columbia University, and was a graduate of Barnard College in 1927.

Hurston was an author of three other novels (Jonah’s Gourd Vine, 1934; Moses, Man of the Mountain, 1939; and Seraph on the Suwanee, 1948); two books of folklore (Mules and Men, 1935, and Tell My Horse, 1938); an autobiography (Dust Tracks on a Road, 1942); and over fifty short stories, essays, and plays.

She died in Fort Pierce, Florida in 1960. In 1973, Alice Walker had a headstone placed at her gravesite with this epitaph: “Zora Neale Hurston: A Genius of the South.”