by Zora Neale Hurston

This landmark gathering of Zora Neale Hurston's short fiction - most of which appeared only in literary magazines during her lifetime and some of which has never been published - reveals the evolution of the talents of one of the most important African-American writers. Spanning the years from 1921, when Howard University's literary magazine published "John Redding Goes to Sea," to 1955, when Hurston was working on different versions of the story of the beheading of John the Baptist as told by Salome's mother, five years before her death, these stories attest to the author's tremendous range at the same time as they establish themes that recur in her longer fiction. In such stories as "Spunk," "The Gilded Six-Bits," and "The Conscience of the Court," Hurston's customary use of metaphor and black dialect enriches her simple narratives and brings her characters vividly to life. Folklore, the cornerstone of Hurston's fiction, is integral to such stories as "Cock Robin Beale Street," "Book of Harlem," and "'Possum or Pig?" Biblical themes, another trademark Hurston offering, appear in "The Seventh Veil" and "The Bone of Contention." These and the other stories in this collection map, in rich language and imagery, Hurston's development and concerns as a writer and provide an invaluable reflection of the mind and imagination of the author of the acclaimed novel Their Eyes Were Watching God.