Zora Neale Hurston: a Bibliography of “A Genius of the South”

Biography

Zora Neale Hurston is widely regarded as one of the most prominent Black female writers and thinkers of the twentieth century. Her most famous novel, Their Eyes Were Watching God, is currently widely read and taught, and was recently named to the BBC’s list of “100 Novels That Shaped Our World.” However, Hurston did not gain monetary success from her writings during her lifetime–she died impoverished in 1960, and was buried in an unmarked grave.

Zora Neale Hurston was born in Notasulga, Alabama on January 7, 1891, and moved to Eatonville, Florida three years later; Eatonville features prominently in many of Hurston’s stories. Her mother died when she was only thirteen, and her father quickly remarried to a woman whom Hurston despised. She left home at fourteen and lived an itinerant life for over ten years, working menial jobs and struggling to finish her education. When Hurston was twenty-six, she moved to Baltimore and claimed to be sixteen in order to qualify for free public schooling. She graduated from Morgan College, the high school of Morgan State University, in 1918, and continued to present herself as ten years younger than her actual age from that point onward.

Over the next ten years, Hurston earned an associate’s degree from Howard University and a BA in anthropology from Barnard, where she was the only Black student. While in New York, she befriended other Black writers such as Langston Hughes, Dorothy West, and Countee Cullen. She quickly became a leading figure of the Harlem Renaissance, publishing writings in books and magazines such as The New Negro, Fire!!, and Opportunity. Her first novel, Jonah’s Gourd Vine, was published in 1934.

In addition to her fiction, Hurston also published a range of journalistic and anthropological works. In 1936, she received a Guggenheim fellowship, which she used to travel to Jamaica and Haiti. There, she collected stories and material on African rituals and voodoo which were eventually published in Mules and Men and Tell My Horse, two nonfiction collections. While in Haiti, Hurston wrote Their Eyes Were Watching God, which is considered to be her masterwork. She published her two other novels, Moses, Man of the Mountain and Seraph on the Suwanee, as well as her controversial autobiography Dust Tracks on a Road, in the years following, while working as a freelance writer and journalist.

Although much of Hurston’s writing was received with acclaim, she was often underpaid. By age sixty she required public assistance to make ends meet, and was forced to enter St. Lucie County Welfare Home as a result of her financial and medical difficulties. She died of heart disease on January 28, 1960, too poor to afford a headstone for her grave.

Hurston’s resurgence in popularity, beginning in the 1970s, can be chiefly attributed to fellow Black female author and Hurston scholar Alice Walker, and the creation of African American Studies programs at American universities. Walker tracked down Hurston’s remains in 1973, and installed a grave marker at the site with the inscription “A Genius of the South.” In 1975, she published an article in Ms. magazine titled “In Search of Zora Neale Hurston,” which revived interest in her works, and in 2003 gave the Virginia Gildersleeve lecture at Barnard summarizing her stewardship of Hurston’s legacy.

Since then, Hurston has been the recipient of many posthumous honors. Over the past thirty years, she has been inducted into the National Women’s Hall of Fame, the New York Writers Hall of Fame, and the Alabama Writers Hall of Fame. There have been entire conferences devoted to scholarship surrounding her works, and awards and fellowships given in her name. While Hurston didn’t receive the praise and profits she deserved during her lifetime, she still undeniably left her mark on the field of American literature.

Biography compiled from the following sources:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zora_Neale_Hurston
https://www.zoranealehurston.com/about/
https://www.womenshistory.org/education-resources/biographies/zora-hurston
https://www.literaryladiesguide.com/author-biography/hurston-zora-neale/

Bibliography: Primary Sources

For length purposes, I have limited this bibliography to only include her short stories, novels, and plays. Most notably, this neglects her nonfiction books, autobiography, news articles, musical compositions, and folk tales. A listing of these other writings can be found at the UCF Zora Neale Hurston Digital Archive.

For many of the more obscure and unpublished works, I was unable to find an original edition—I have chosen to cite either archival holdings of manuscripts, or more modern printings of the works. If I was unable to find a digital surrogate of a given story, I relied on the information given in Hitting a Straight Lick with a Crooked Stick and The Complete Stories for publication information.

Links and books used to compile and locate documents:  
• WorldCat   
• Hurston, Zora Neale. The Complete Stories. New York: HarperCollins, 1995. 
• Hurston, Zora Neale. Hitting a Straight Lick with a Crooked Stick. New York: HarperCollins, 2020.
• https://onlinebooks.library.upenn.edu/serials.html
• http://web.uflib.ufl.edu/spec/manuscript/hurston/hurston.htm
• https://archives.yale.edu/repositories/11/archival_objects/363513
• https://chdr.cah.ucf.edu/hurstonarchive/?p=published-genres

First Editions

Short Stories

1. Hurston, Zora N. “John Redding Goes to Sea.” Stylus, May 1921.
   • Text Link
2. Hurston, Zora N. The Conversion of Sam. circa 1922. TS. Zora Neale Hurston Collection, Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture.
3. Hurston, Zora N. “A Bit of Our Harlem.” Negro World, 8 April 1922.
   • Text Link
4. Hurston, Zora N. “Drenched in Light.” Opportunity, December 1924, pp. 371-74.
   • Text Link
5. Hurston, Zora N. “Magnolia Flower.” The Spokesman, July 1925.
   • Text Link
6. Hurston, Zora N. “Muttsy.” Opportunity, June 1925.
   • Text Link
7. Hurston, Zora N. “Spunk.” Opportunity, August 1926.
   • Text Link
8. Hurston, Zora N. “’Possum or Pig?.” The Forum, September 1926.
9. Hurston, Zora N. “The Eatonville Anthology.” The Messenger, September-November 1926.
10. Hurston, Zora N. “Sweat.” Fire, November 1926.
    • Text Link
11. Hurston, Zora N. “Under the Bridge.” The X-Ray, December 1926.
12. Hurston, Zora N. “The Book of Harlem.” The Pittsburgh Courier, 12 February 1927.
13. Hurston, Zora N. “The Back Room.” The Pittsburgh Courier, 19 February 1927.
14. Hurston, Zora N. “Monkey Junk.” The Pittsburgh Courier, 5 March 1927.
    • Text Link
15. Hurston, Zora N. “The Country in the Woman.” The Pittsburgh Courier, 26 March 1927.
    • Text Link
16. Hurston, Zora N. “The Gilded Six-Bits.” Story, August 1933.
    • Text Link
17. Hurston, Zora N. “She Rock.” The Pittsburgh Courier, 5 August 1933.
18. Hurston, Zora N. “Mother Catherine.” Negro: An Anthology, edited by Nancy Cunard, Wishart & Co, 1934, pp. 54-57.
    • Text Link
19. Hurston, Zora N. “Uncle Monday.” Negro: An Anthology, edited by Nancy Cunard, Wishart & Co, 1934, pp. 57-61.
    • Text Link
20. Hurston, Zora N. “The Fire and the Cloud.” Challenge, September 1934.
    • Text Link
21. Hurston, Zora N. “Cock Robin Beale Street.” Southern Literary Messenger, July 1941, pp. 321-323.
22. Hurston, Zora N. “Story in Harlem Slang.” American Mercury, July 1942.
    • Text Link
23. Hurston, Zora N. “High John De Conquer.” American Mercury, 1943-1944, pp. 450-458.
    • Text Link
24. Hurston, Zora N. “Hurricane.” Taken at the Flood: The Human Drama as Seen by Modern American Novelists, edited by Ann E. Watkins, Harper & Brothers, 1946.
    • Note: originally in Their Eyes Were Watching God
25. Hurston, Zora N. “The Conscience of the Court.” Saturday Evening Post, 18 May 1950, pp. 22, 112-122.
    • Text Link
26. Hurston, Zora N. “Escape from Pharaoh.” Ways of God and Men: Great Stories from the Bible in World Literature, edited by Ruth Selden, Stephen Daye Press, 1950.
    • Note: originally in Moses: Man of the Mountain
27. Hurston, Zora N. “The Tablets of the Law.” The Word Lives on: A Treasury of Spiritual Fiction, edited by Frances Brentano, Doubleday, 1951.
    • Note: originally in Moses: Man of the Mountain
28. Hurston, Zora N and Langston Hughes. “The Bone of Contention.” Mule Bone: a Comedy of Negro Life, HarperPerennial, 1991.
29. Hurston, Zora N. “Black Death.” The Complete Stories of Zora Neale Hurston, HarperCollins, 1995.
    • Text Link
30. Hurston, Zora N. “Book of Harlem.” Hurston: Novels and Stories, Library of America, 1995.
31. Hurston, Zora N. Harlem Slanguage. N.d. TS. Zora Neale Hurston Collection, Yale University.
    • Text Link
32. Hurston, Zora N. Now You Cookin’ with Gas. N.d. TS. Zora Neale Hurston Collection, Yale University.
    • Text Link
33. Hurston, Zora N. The Seventh Veil. N.d. MS. Zora Neale Hurston Papers, University of Florida.
34. Hurston, Zora N. The Woman in Gaul. N.d. Zora Neale Hurston Papers, University of Florida.

First Edition Novels

1. Hurston, Zora N. Jonah’s Gourd Vine. Philadelphia: J.B. Lippincott Company, 1934.
   • Text Link
2. Hurston, Zora N. Their Eyes Were Watching God. Philadelphia: J.B. Lippincott Company, 1937.
   • Text Link
3. Hurston, Zora N. Moses, Man of the Mountain. Philadelphia: J.B. Lippincott Company, 1939.
   • Text Link
4. Hurston, Zora N. Seraph on the Sewanee. New York: Scribner’s Sons, 1948.
   • Text Link

Plays

1. Hurston, Zora N. “Meet the Mamma. (1925)” Zora Neale Hurston: Collected Plays, edited by Jean Lee Cole and Charles Mitchell, Rutgers University Press, 2008.
   • Text Link
2. Hurston, Zora N. “Color Struck, a play.” Fire, November 1926, pp. 7-14.
3. Hurston, Zora N. “Spears (1926).” Zora Neale Hurston: Collected Plays, edited by Jean Lee Cole and Charles Mitchell, Rutgers University Press, 2008.
4. Hurston, Zora N. “The First One (1927).” Zora Neale Hurston: Collected Plays, edited by Jean Lee Cole and Charles Mitchell, Rutgers University Press, 2008.
5. Hurston, Zora N. Cold Keener, a Revue. 1930. TS. Zora Neale Hurston Plays at the Library of Congress.
   • Text Link
6. Hurston, Zora N. and Langston Hughes. De Turkey and De Law. 1930. TS. Zora Neale Hurston Plays at the Library of Congress.
   • Text Link
7. Hurston, Zora N. and Rowena W. Jeliffe. “The Sermon in the Valley (1931).” Zora Neale Hurston: Collected Plays, edited by Jean Lee Cole and Charles Mitchell, Rutgers University Press, 2008.
8. Hurston, Zora N. Forty Yards. 1931. TS. Zora Neale Hurston Plays at the Library of Congress.
   • Text Link
9. Hurston, Zora N. Lawning and Jawning. 1931. TS. Zora Neale Hurston Plays at the Library of Congress.
   • Text Link
10. Hurston, Zora N. Poker!. 1931. TS. Zora Neale Hurston Plays at the Library of Congress.
    • Text Link
11. Hurston, Zora N. Woofing. 1931. TS. Zora Neale Hurston Plays at the Library of Congress.
    • Text Link
12. Hurston, Zora N. The Fiery Chariot. 1932. TS. Zora Neale Hurston Papers, University of Florida.
13. Hurston, Zora N. Spunk. 1935. TS. Zora Neale Hurston Plays at the Library of Congress.
    • Text Link
14. Hurston, Zora N. and Dorothy Waring. Polk County. 1944. TS. Zora Neale Hurston Plays at the Library of Congress.
    • Text Link

Later and Modern Editions

Modern Reprints

1. Hurston, Zora N. Jonah’s Gourd Vine. Philadelphia: Lippincott, 1971. Print.
2. Hurston, Zora N, and Rita Dove. Jonah’s Gourd Vine.  New York, N.Y: HarperPerennial, 1990. Print.
3. Hurston, Zora N. Their Eyes Were Watching God: A Novel. New York: Perennial Library, 1990. Print.
4. Hurston, Zora N, and Deborah E. McDowell. Moses, Man of the Mountain. New York: HarperCollins, 1991. Print.
5. Hurston, Zora N, and Hazel V. Carby. Seraph on the Suwanee: A Novel. New York: HarperPerennial, 1991. Print.
6. Hurston, Zora N. Their Eyes Were Watching God: A Novel. New York: HarperCollins, 2006. Print.
7. Hurston, Zora N, Rita Dove, and Henry L. Gates. Jonah’s Gourd Vine: A Novel. New York, N.Y: HarperPerennial, 2008. Print.
8. Hurston, Zora N, Hazel V. Carby, and Henry L. Gates. Seraph on the Suwanee: A Novel. New York: HarperPerennial, 2008. Print.
9. Hurston, Zora N, and Henry L. Gates. Moses, Man of the Mountain. New York: Harper Perennial, 2009. Print.
10. Hurston, Zora N, Edwidge Danticat, and Henry L. Gates. Their Eyes Were Watching God. New York: HarperPerennial, 2010. Print.

Collections

1. Hurston, Zora N. Spunk: The Selected Stories of Zora Neale Hurston. London: Camden Press, 1987. Print.
2. Hurston, Zora N. Novels and Stories. New York: Literary Classics of the United States, 1995. Print.
3. Hurston, Zora N. Folklore, Memoirs, and Other Writings: Mules and Men, Tell My Horse, Dust Tracks on a Road, Selected Articles. New York: Library of America, 1995. Print.
4. Hurston, Zora N, Jean L. Cole, and Charles Mitchell. Zora Neale Hurston: Collected Plays. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2008. Print.
5. Hurston, Zora N, Henry L. Gates, Sieglinde Lemke, and Alice Walker. The Complete Stories. New York: HarperPerennial, 2008. Print.
6. Hurston, Zora N, Alice Walker, and Mary H. Washington. I Love Myself When I Am Laughing … and Then Again When I Am Looking Mean and Impressive: A Zora Neale Hurston Reader. New York: Feminist Press, 2020. Print.
7. Hurston, Zora N. Hitting a Straight Lick with a Crooked Stick. New York: HarperCollins, 2020. Print.

In Translation

• Chinese: Hurston, Zora N, and Jiaxiang Wang. Ta Men Yan Wang Shang Cang. Beijing: Beijing shi yue wen yi chu ban she, 2000. Print.
• Czech: Hurston, Zora N. Ich Oci Vyzeraly Boha: Roman. Prelozila Maria Rafajová. Zivena: V.T. Sv. Martine, 1947. Print.
• Dutch: Hurston, Zora N, and Lieke Frese. En Ze Keken Naar God. Breda: De Geus, 1999. Print.
• German: Hurston, Zora N. Und Ihre Augen Schauten Gott: Roman. Zürich: Ammann, 1993. Print.
• Haitian Creole: Hurston, Zora N, and Zermatt Scutt. Tout Je Te Sou Bondye. , 2018. Print.
• Italian: Hurston, Zora N, and Adriana Bottini. I Loro Occhi Guardavano Dio. Napoli: Cargo, 2009. Print.
• Japanese: Hurston, Zora N, and Noboru Matsumoto. Karera No Me Wa Kami O Miteita. Tōkyō: Shinjukushobō, 1995. Print.
• Korean: Hurston, Zora N, and Mi-sŏn Yi. Kŭdŭl Ŭi Nun Ŭn Sin Ŭl Pogo Issŏtta. Sŏul T’ŭkpyŏlsi: Munye Ch’ulp’ansa, 2014. Print.
• Portuguese: Hurston, Zora N. O Seu Olhar Posto Em Deus. Santiago de Compostela: Laiovento, 1993. Print.
• Spanish: Hurston, Zora N, and Andrés Ibáñez. Sus Ojos Miraban a Dios. Barcelona: Lumen, 1995. Print.
• Turkish: Hurston, Zora N, and Ayşe S. O. Yener. Tanrıya Bakıyorlardı. Ankara: Phoenix Yayınevi, 2003. Print.

Anthologies

1. Hughes, Langston. The Best Short Stories by Negro Writers: An Anthology from 1899 to the Present. Boston: Little, Brown and Company, 1967. Print.
2. Hoffman, Nancy, Florence Howe, and Elaine Hedges. Women Working: An Anthology of Stories and Poems. Old Westbury, N.Y: Feminist Press, 1979. Print.
3. Gates, Henry L. Reading Black, Reading Feminist: A Critical Anthology. New York:  Meridian Book, 1990. Print.
4. Hamalian, Leo, and James V. Hatch. The Roots of African American Drama: An Anthology of Early Plays, 1858-1938. Detroit, MI: Wayne State University Press, 1991. Print.
5. Knopf-Newman, Marcy J. The Sleeper Wakes: Harlem Renaissance Stories by Women. New Brunswick, N.J: Rutgers University Press, 1993. Print.
6. Major, Clarence. Calling the Wind: Twentieth Century African-American Short Stories. New York, NY: HarperPerennial, 1993. Print.
7. Gates, Henry L, and Nellie Y. McKay. The Norton Anthology of African American Literature. New York: W.W. Norton & Co., 1996. Print.
8. Roses, Lorraine E, and Ruth E. Randolph. Harlem’s Glory: Black Women Writing, 1900-1950. Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press, 1996. Print.
9. Andrews, William L. The Literature of the American South: A Norton Anthology. New York: W.W. Norton & Co., 1998. Print.
10. Coles, Robert, Randy-Michael Testa, and Michael H. Coles. Growing Up Poor: A Literary Anthology. New York: New Press, 2001. Print.
11. Bausch, Richard, and R V. Cassill. The Norton Anthology of Short Fiction. New York: W. W. Norton, 2015. Print.

For Younger Readers

1. Cohn, Amy L, and Molly Bang. From Sea to Shining Sea: A Treasury of American Folklore and Folk Songs. New York: Scholastic, 1993. Print.
2. Lyons, Mary E. Sorrow’s Kitchen: The Life and Folklore of Zora Neale Hurston. New York, NY: Aladdin Paperbacks, 1993. Print.
3. McKissack, Pat, and Fredrick McKissack. Zora Neale Hurston, Writer and Storyteller. Berkeley Heights, NJ: Enslow, 2002. Print.
4. Fradin, Judith B, and Dennis B. Fradin. Zora!: The Life of Zora Neal Hurston. Boston: Clarion Books, 2012. Print.
5. Schatz, Kate, and Stahl M. Klein. Rad American Women A-Z. San Francisco: City Lights Books, 2015. Print.

Bibliography: Secondary Sources

Selected Scholarly Articles

1. Lupton, Mary Jane. “Zora Neale Hurston and the Survival of the Female.” The Southern Literary Journal, vol. 15, no. 1, 1982, pp. 45–54.
2. Crabtree, Claire. “The Confluence of Folklore, Feminism and Black Self-Determination in Zora Neale Hurston’s ‘Their Eyes Were Watching God.’” The Southern Literary Journal, vol. 17, no. 2, 1985, pp. 54–66.
3. Jordan, Jennifer. “Feminist Fantasies: Zora Neale Hurston’s ‘Their Eyes Were Watching God.’” Tulsa Studies in Women’s Literature, vol. 7, no. 1, 1988, pp. 105–117.
4. Deck, Alice A. “Autoethnography: Zora Neale Hurston, Noni Jabavu, and Cross-Disciplinary Discourse.” Black American Literature Forum, vol. 24, no. 2, 1990, pp. 237–256.
5. Dutton, Wendy. “The Problem of Invisibility: Voodoo and Zora Neale Hurston.” Frontiers: A Journal of Women Studies, vol. 13, no. 2, 1993, pp. 131–152.
6. Duck, Leigh Anne. “‘Go There Tuh Know There’: Zora Neale Hurston and the Chronotype of the Folk.” American Literary History, vol. 13, no. 2, 2001, pp. 265–294.
7. Kraut, Anthea. “Between Primitivism and Diaspora: The Dance Performances of Josephine Baker, Zora Neale Hurston, and Katherine Dunham.” Theatre Journal, vol. 55, no. 3, 2003, pp. 433–450.
8. Brooks, Daphne A. “‘Sister, Can You Line It Out?”: Zora Neale Hurston and the Sound of Angular Black Womanhood.” Amerikastudien / American Studies, vol. 55, no. 4, 2010, pp. 617–627.
9. Marcucci, Olivia. “Zora Neale Hurston and the Brown Debate: Race, Class, and the Progressive Empire.” The Journal of Negro Education, vol. 86, no. 1, 2017, pp. 13–24.
10. Maner, Sequioa. “’Where Do You Go When You Go Quiet?’: The Ethics of Interiority in the Fiction of Zora Neale Hurston, Alice Walker, and Beyoncé.” Meridians, vol. 17, no. 1, 2018, pp.184-204. 

Conference Proceedings and Published Bibliographies

1. Sheffey, Ruthe T. A Rainbow Round Her Shoulder: The Zora Neale Hurston Symposium Papers. Baltimore, MD: Morgan State University Press, 1982. Print.
2. Grant, Alice M. All About Zora: Proceedings of the Academic Conference of the First Annual Zora Neale Hurston Festival of the Arts, January 26-27, 1990, Eatonville, Florida. Winter Park, FL: Four-G Publishers, 1999. Print.
3. Newson, Adele S. An Annotated Bibliography of Critical Response to Zora Neale Hurston. 1986. Michigan State University, PhD dissertation.
4. Davis, Rose P, and Zora N. Hurston. Zora Neale Hurston: An Annotated Bibliography and Reference Guide. Westport, Conn: Greenwood Press, 1997. Print.

Archival Holdings

Dedicated Zora Neale Hurston Collections

• Yale, Zora Neale Hurston Collection, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library
  • Includes correspondence, manuscripts, and drafts of published writings.
  • Link
• Library of Congress, Zora Neale Hurston Plays at the Library of Congress
  • Includes ten unpublished typescripts of plays written by ZNH.
  • Link
• University of Florida, Zora Neale Hurston Papers, Smathers Libraries
  • “Correspondence, newspaper clippings, articles, manuscripts, photographs, miscellaneous personal papers. Correspondence concerning race relations, Hurston’s writings and fieldwork, personal matters; manuscripts of articles, short stories, plays; biographical material about Zora Neale Hurston.”
  • Link
• NYPL, Zora Neale Hurston Collection
  • Includes nine poems, one short story, and correspondence
  • Link