You Don't Know Us Negroes and Other Essays

Outstanding!

I have admired Zora since reading "Their Eyes Were Watching God", which details events involving her Black friends and neighbors, with nary a White person to be seen. They were themselves (and she admired them), they stood on their own power (as she did) and the honesty of the depictions is undeniable. In these essays she discusses aspects of Black society, education, politics, art. race and attitudes in a clear-sighted way that you will not find elsewhere. Her strong will and unflinching honesty eventually got her rejected by the Black elites like Langston Hughes and the Harlem Renaissance; the attitudes of the opposing parties are pretty clear in this book but details of her own fate are absent. I plan to read "Langston vs. Zora" next to see if it offers insights.

It’s Zora. A must for the reader, collector and historian alike.

Zora Neale Hurston is a spectacular writer. Like every writer of color, she is superior to White writers of her time yet still wasn’t seen as such for decades.

Everyone should know the name Zora Neale Hurston — and my guess is after her name came up on Jeopardy! fans scrambled to find out about her, especially the contestants who didn’t get her name. This your golden opportunity to know one of the most extraordinary American writers of the 20th century.