ary 1943 letter to Hamilton Holt, the president of
Rollins College, she declared, “Truly I am glad that
you liked Dust Tracks.I did not want to write it at
all, because it is too hard to reveal one’s inner self,
and still there is no use in writing that kind of
book unless you do” (Kaplan, 478).
As Maya Angelou notes in her foreword to a
recent edition of the work, not only did Hurston
“choose to write her own version of life in Dust
Tracks on a Road” but what Hurston reports “is
enough to convince the reader that [she] had dra-
matic adventures and was a quintessential survivor”
(Angelou, viii). Angelou’s generous evaluation hints
at one of the key features of the autobiography:
Hurston’s liberal use of mythic images and narra-
tives. Indeed as Lynn Domina points out, “in her
folklore, that is, she tells her own story, while in her
autobiography, she includes much ‘lore’” (Domina,
197).
Hurston’s champion, the writer Alice Walker,
is one of several critics who believe that Dust
Tracksfails to match the intensity and authenticity
of Hurston’s other works. Her evaluation echoes
scholar Robert Hemenway’s suggestion that the
work reflects Hurston’s deep conflict about genre
and her own writing goals. Yet, as Hurston biogra-
pher Valerie Boyd cautions, “readers cannot dis-
miss Dust Tracksunless they also are willing to
dismiss LANGSTONHUGHES’s THEBIGSEAand
RICHARDWRIGHT’s Black Boy—two other auto-
biographies published in the 1940s in which black
writers engaged in mythmaking about their lives”
(Boyd, 355).
Some 5,000 copies of Dust Trackssold during
its first publication run, and, despite its controver-
sial presentation, it was awarded the Anisfield-
World Award in Racial Relations and an award of
$1,000 from the Saturday Review.The prize com-
mittee deemed it “the best book of the year con-
cerned with racial problems in the field of creative
literature” (Kaplan, 438) and featured the book on
its February 1943 cover.Bibliography
Angelou, Maya. Foreword to Dust Tracks on a Road,by
Zora Neale Hurston. New York: HarperPerennial,
1991.
Boyd, Valerie. Wrapped in Rainbows: The Life of Zora
Neale Hurston.New York: Scribner, 2003.
Domina, Lynn. “‘Protection in My Mouf’: Self, Voice,
and Community in Zora Neale Hurston’s Dust
Tracks on a Roadand Mules and Men.” African
American Review31, no. 2 (1997): 197–209.
Kaplan, Carla. Zora Neale Hurston: A Life in Letters.New
York: Doubleday, 2002.
Hemenway, Robert. Zora Neale Hurston: A Literary Biog-
raphy.Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1977.Dykes, Eva Beatrice(1893–1986)
A RADCLIFFECOLLEGE–educated scholar who in
1921 became one of the first black women to re-
ceive a Ph.D. in America. Dykes graduated from
DUNBARHIGHSCHOOLand from HOWARDUNI-
VERSITYin WASHINGTON, D.C., the city of her
birth. Following graduate studies at Radcliffe,
where she earned an A.B., A.M., and Ph.D., she
returned to teach at both of her alma maters in the
nation’s capital. Her publications, the bulk of
which appeared in the 1940s, included The Negro
in English Romantic Thoughtand scholarly articles
that appeared in leading humanities journals.Bibliography
Roses, Lorraine Elena, and Ruth Elizabeth Randolph.
Harlem Renaissance and Beyond: Literary Biographies
of 100 Black Women Writers, 1900–1945.Boston: G.
K. Hall & Co., 1990.Dykes, Eva Beatrice 131