will be published in American Visions. This collec-
tion firmly demonstrates Hurston’s command of
narrative voice, plot, themes of human injustice,
and the Southern black vernacular voice. Every
Tongue Got to Confess (2001) a large collection
of more than 500 folktales collected in the Gulf
States, was compiled in the late 1920s. It consti-
tutes a major part of Hurston’s folkloric literary
legacy, which has lain forgotten in the Library of
Congress since 1927. In December 1996 a short
story titled “Under the Bridge” was found, as well
as the text of another play, “Spear.” “The Woman
of Gaul,” a short story, was finally printed in 1995.
Scribner’s rejected The Golden Bench of God, a
novel based on the life of Madame C. J. Walker,
in 1951. From 1953 to 1960 Hurston worked on a
major novel on the life of Herod the Great, hoping
Cecil B. DeMille would make a major epic mo-
tion picture of it. What she came to refer to as her
“great obsession” is now an incomplete, charred,
water-stained manuscript.
Zora Neale Hurston’s literary reputation waxed
briefly and waned quickly. In 1960 she was little
more than a footnote in American literary history.
Her literary resurrection in the early 1980s had
much to do with the rise of feminist and woman-
ist studies, African-American studies, multicultur-
alism, and the search by young black and white
women writers like ALICE WALKER for a literary
matrilineage. In 1973 Walker located and marked
the possible site of Hurston’s grave, and in 1975
Walker published her famous Ms. magazine essay
chiding those who had neglected one so talented.
Alice Walker’s powerful account of finding Hur-
ston’s gravesite published in Ms. magazine greatly
spurred the revival of her reputation. The post-
1970s boom in interest in Hurston’s career has re-
sulted in the emergence of a vigorous critical and
biographical reexamination of her life and writ-
ings. In 1996 Hurston became the fourth African-
American and the fifth woman to be published in
the prestigious Library of America series. Hurston,
who always presented herself as a performance
artist, folk character and writer with deep roots
in black oral and print culture traditions, signifi-
cantly helped establish the foundations of a BLACK
AESTHETIC. Celebrated as griot, actress, preacher,
signifying ethnographer, BLUES singer, trickster, and
literary artist, she is seen by many as the literary
foremother of the 20th-century African-American
and women’s literary traditions.
Gloria L. CroninHurston, Zora Neale 261