[The following essay was originally published in 1937.]

[Zora Neale Hurston's] short stories "Drenched With Light," "Spunk" and "The Gilded Six Bits" showed a command of folklore and idiom excelled by no earlier Negro novelist. Jonah's Gourd Vine (1934) recounts the rise of handsome, stalwart John Buddy from plowboy to moderator of the Baptists of Florida. But his flair for preaching and praying is exceeded by his weakness for women…. Loosely constructed, the novel presents authentic scenes of timber camps, railroad gangs with the "hammer-muscling men, the liars, fighters, bluffers and lovers," and the all-colored towns of Florida. The folk-speech is richly, almost too consistently, poetic. The characters are less developed than the setting; and the life they live is self-contained and untroubled. Nevertheless, Jonah's Gourd Vine contains the stuff of life, well observed and rendered.

A trained anthropologist as well as a native of Florida, Zora Neale Hurston has made in Mules and Men (1935) the first substantial collection of folktales by a Negro scholar. Zestful towards her material, and completely unashamed of it, she ingratiated herself with the tellers of tall tales…. Miss Hurston's "big old lies" are a delight to read…. Unfortunately, Mules and Men does not uncover so much that white collectors have been unable to get. The tales ring genuine, but there seem to be omissions. The picture is too pastoral, with only a bit of grumbling about hard work, or a few slave anecdotes that turn the tables on old marster. The bitterness that E.C.L. Adams recorded in Nigger to Nigger is not to be found in Mules and Men.

Miss Hurston's second novel, Their Eyes Were Watching God (1937) is informed and sympathetic…. There are good sketches of the all-colored town where comic-serious debates and tall tales are told on the mayor's store porch. But the love story and the poetic folk-speech are the chief interests. The people, "ugly from ignorance and broken from being poor," who swarm upon the "muck" for short-time jobs, do not get much attention. (pp. 159-61)