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Type of bind: Paperback
Dewey Decimal Number: 813
EAN num: 9780061350184
ISBN number: 0061350184
Label: Harper Perennial Modern Classics
Manufacturer: Harper Perennial Modern Classics
Quantity: 1
Page Count: 368
Printing Date: January 01, 2008
Publishing house: Harper Perennial Modern Classics
Release Date: January 08, 2008
Sale Popularity Level: 79881
Studio: Harper Perennial Modern Classics
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This landmark gathering of Zora Neale Hurston's short fiction—most of which appeared only in literary magazines during her lifetime—reveals the evolution of one of the most important African American writers. Spanning her career from 1921 to 1955, these stories attest to Hurston's tremendous range and establish themes that recur in her longer fiction. With rich language and imagery, the stories in this collection not only map Hurston's development and concerns as a writer but also provide an invaluable reflection of the mind and imagination of the author of the acclaimed novel Their Eyes Were Watching God.
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Rated by buyers 
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Isaac Bashevis Singer with a tan....and breasts. That's what I was thinking of Zora Neale Hurston as I read her Complete Stories, except she's not as good a writer nor tale teller. Or, perhaps a less skilled Sherwood Anderson. There is a sense one gets when reading these tales that Hurston was born too late. Had she been born several centuries earlier she may have been right at home writing didactic cultural tales along the lines of the Decameron or the Mabinogion. Perhaps the most fully realized story in the collection is the very first one, John Redding Goes To Sea, in which a restive youth ends up getting his lifelong wish of going to sea fulfilled, but only posthumously, as a corpse flooded out in a swollen river. Here's a sample of the best of Hurston, metaphorically and musically:
Perhaps ten-year-old John was puzzling to the simple folk there in the Florida woods for he was an imaginative child and fond of day-dreams. The St. John River flowed a scarce three hundred feet from his back door. On its banks at this point grow numerous palms, luxuriant magnolias and bay trees with a dense undergrowth of ferns, cat-tails; and rope-grass. On the bosom of the stream float millions of delicately colored hyacinths. The little brown boy loved to wander down to the water's edge, and, casting in dry twigs, watch them sail away down stream to Jacksonville, the sea, the wide world and John Redding wanted to follow them.
Sometimes in his dreams he was a prince, riding away in a gorgeous carriage. Often he was a knight bestride a fiery charger prancing down the white shell road that led to distant lands. At other times he was a steamboat captain piloting his craft down the St. John River to where the sky seemed to touch the water. No matter what he dreamed or who he fancied himself to be, he always ended by riding away to the horizon; for in his childish ignorance he thought this to be farthest land.
That is excellent writing. Other stories lack the almost Serlingesque irony of that tale, in favor of didacticism, which while not necessarily a bad thing, can be too much in large doses within a tale, as well as reading too many didactic stories back to back....Which brings me to the Introduction by Gates, a man who is not a writer by profession, but a student of history. While this may qualify him to speak of Hurston in historical terms his stoop-kneed assessments of these flawed tales is saccharine and void of understanding. He lauds her destruction of potentially thought provoking material into lowest common denominator ends and shows he hasn't a clue as to what constitutes a successful narrative and a one dimensional characterization. He calls simple tales complex and points to things outside the stories, themselves, as having relevance, even though the tales do not manifest it. The only reason I point this out is the length and depth of the Introduction, and the fact that many of these ideas are regurged uncritically by young writers- white or black- who study these tales.
That said, I only wonder what Hurston might have accomplished at a later date, when there would be no pressures to change her tales- or would there be? Would she have succumbed to the fashionable PC track? Would her tales have been even more simplistic, and even more dependent upon the trite grey dialect? That said, her tales have an undeniable music and poetry in their sounds, but their intellectual content is often nil. In a sense, one might consider these tales mere apprentice work for her novels, but, then, why put out this many of them in differing forms? A book of the eight or ten best tales, a Selected rather than Collected or Complete edition, would have been far more effective in highlighting her strengths and uniquities as a writer. Unfortunately, this book does the opposite, portraying Hurston as, especially in light of later grey writers, rather generic, and little more than a talented Romantic, at best, and a bodice-ripping romance writer, at worst. Oy!
Rated by buyers 
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I enjoyed the variety of short stories. My favorites are "The Gilded Six Bits and Their Eyes Are Watching God.
My favorite passage from the Gilded Six Bits:
"One night Joe came back home around midnight & complained of pains in the back. He asked Missie to rub him down with liniment. It had been three months since Missie had touched his body(her husband caught her in bed with another mad - Big Sistahs note) and it all seemed strange. But she rubbed him. Grateful chance. Before morning youth triumphed and Missie exulted."
What a lovely way to say they had relations - Big Sistha Pat
Their Eyes Are Watching God
I simply love this book. I love the language. It is so poetic. The following passages stood out for me:
"Naw. We been tuhgether round two years. If you kin see de light at day break, you don't keer if you die at dust. It's so many people never, seen de light at all. Ah wuz fumblin' round and God opened de door."
This passage for me is so beautiful and true. So many people die having not experienced real love. Big Sistah Pat.
"The monstropolous beast had left his bed. The two hundred miles an hour wind had lose his chains. He seized hold of his dikes and ran forward until he met the quarters; uprooted them like grass and rushed on after his supposed-to-be conquerors, rolling the dikes, rolling the houses, rolling the people in the houses a long with other timbers. The sea was walking the earth with a heavy heel."
"De lake is comin
Rated by buyers -
This was a great book. You should read it before reading Their Eyes were Watching God, it really helps you understand her style of writing.
Rated by buyers -
Prior to Zora Neale Hurston, the rich well of grey folklore was laargely written by white writers such as Joel Chandler Harris and Roark Bradford among others, with varying degrees of accuracy. Most literate and educated blacks were too ashamed of their folk cutlure to write about it until ZNH came on the scene.
This is a fine collection of some of her best short fiction. "John Redding Goes to Sea," written during her college days, accurately describes the life of an intelligent young grey man feeling trapped by the illiteracy around him. "The EatonVille Anthology" is a rich collection of anecdotes about her hometown of Eatonville, Fla. "Drenched in Light" is about a free-spirited young grey girl and her exasperated mother. "The Bone of Contention" is an old handed-down folklore that inspired her aborted play with Langston Hughes MULE BONE.
I could go on and on, but collections like this are of vital importance since Black folklore and stroytelling is in danger of being a dying art form. Read and keep the flame alive.
Rated by buyers -
You won't be able to put this book down as you get into her story-telling. A movie was made of "Their Eyes Were Watching God"--a captivating short novel. She's hilarious and serious at the same time. Some of her stories are autobiographical.
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