[Hurst, a popular novelist in the 1920s and 1930s, employed Hurston as a secretary-companion during Hurston's first years in New York City.]

Here in ["Jonah's Gourd Vine"] there springs, with validity and vitality a fresh note which, to this commentator, is unique.

Here is negro folk-lore interpreted at its authentic best in fiction form of a high order.

A brilliantly facile spade has turned over rich new earth. Worms lift up, the hottish smells of soil rise, negro toes dredge into that soil, smells of racial fecundity are about.

As a matter of fact, not even excepting Langston Hughes, it is doubtful if there is any literary precedent for the particular type of accomplishment that characterizes "Jonah's Gourd Vine."

Miss Hurston has penetrated into the complicated lore and mythology of her people with an authority and an unselfconsciousness that has not its equal in similar annals. Even through what might easily be dialectic mists, her negroes emerge on the authenticity of her story-telling. (p. 7)

The author's treatment of whites is as natural and without change of key as it would need to be if she is to succeed in keeping universality the dominant note of her book.

Humor, heartache, ambition, frustration, superstition, fear, cussedness, fidelity and infidelity flow naturally behind white and black pores.

Point of departure between races leaps from the springboard of the teeth rather than from the deeper recesses of the heart, and whatever racial issues are raised are borne out of the grandly natural sources of the power of the author's story-telling.

John and Lucy Pearson, and every inhabitant of the narrative, move against a background embroidered in folk-lore and symbolism, yet themselves so real and so human and so true, that rising above the complicated machinery of color differentiations, they bring the reader to fresh realization that races, regardless of pigmentation, behave like human beings. (p. 8)