In the late 1920s, organizing notes from her fieldwork in the South, particularly Florida, Hurston began her first effort at a book-length manuscript. Shaping her notes would take several drafts. What existed on the market as guides were negative examples; she knew she wanted a different, more accessible approach. She completed the draft of what would be Mules and Men in 1932 in Eatonville, but found no publisher. Once Hurston had Jonah's Gourd Vine accepted by Lippincott in 1933, she pushed Mules and Men aside and directed her attention to Jonah's Gourd Vine, a novel she had had in her head for some time, and one she had lived with a lifetime, since the inspiration for this novel is her parents; the end result would be the most autobiographical of all her novels.

Jonah's Gourd Vine was written in late summer 1933, and Hurston mailed the typed manuscript to Lippincott on 3 October. According to Hurston's autobiography, more trouble was associated with finding the money to rent a place in Sanford to write the novel, have it typed, and mail it to Philadelphia, than there was in the writing it. Her acceptance from Lippincott arrived within two weeks of her sending it to them. Lippincott released the book in May, which means the book went from manuscript to warehouse in about six months, suggesting a pleased publisher and no need for Hurston to make adjustments to this novel.

Lippincott was open to receiving the manuscript of Mules and Men, but they asked for revisions to what they first saw. No doubt, with marketing in mind, they encouraged her to make the work acceptable to a general audience, and pushed for the addition of the chapters on hoodoo, which had been earlier published in an academic journal. Hurston spent the summer of 1934 making the revisions. Unlike Tell My Horse, her other book of folklore collecting, this first and only edition of Mules and Men published during her lifetime included a three-paragraph forward by Franz Boas and nine illustrations by Miguel Covarrubias, a white artist who was also financially supported by Hurston's patron, Charlotte Osgood Mason. Boas opens his forward with a sentence that identifies the audience as primarily white: “Ever since the time of Uncle Remus, Negro folk-lore has exerted a strong attraction upon the imagination of the American public.”¹ Uncle Remus was made known to readers, largely a white audience, through the published stories of Joel Chandler Harris, which preceded Hurston's work by fifty years.

Hurston wrote Their Eyes Were Watching God in Haiti over seven weeks during late fall 1936, and mailed the handwritten text to Lippincott. The book appeared on the market within nine months. The original manuscript, held in the Beinecke Rare Books Library at Yale University, indicates very little substantive difference from the published version. Their Eyes was one of six novels Lippincott featured, each given a full-page ad in the issue of Publisher's Weekly that announced the fall list of publishers' new offerings.

Continuing to alternate fiction with her nonfiction, Lippincott published Tell My Horse in October 1938, but Hurston did not complete the text until March 1938, based on her time spent in Jamaica and Haiti in 1936 and 1937. Within seven months, the book appeared in bookstores. As with Mules and Men, Hurston made no further revisions to this book, which included twenty-five photographs taken by Rex Hardy Jr. and Hurston herself, and a substantial appendix of songs of worship to voodoo gods. The following year, the book appeared in England under the title Voodoo Gods: An Inquiry into Native Myths and Magic in Jamaica and Haiti, but this British version remained otherwise unaltered.

Using her notes and fresh memories of time in Haiti, Hurston turned her attention in 1938 to writing Moses, Man of the Mountain, in which the biblical story is invigorated and enhanced by Hurston's knowledge of the good side of voodoo and the importance of the biblical Moses as the model for Damballah, the chief hoodoo priest. Hurston's fieldwork in Haiti was essential to the writing of the book, and she seemed to do her best work when she worked quickly. The topic might be a long time brewing, but when she set to the task of writing fiction, the story appeared to carry itself. Invariably, though, Hurston's fiction is the result of her efforts spent sequestered in some quiet spot; during intense and restricted periods of writing she did her best work away from the company of others. In November 1939, a month after Voodoo Gods appeared in England, Moses, Man of the Mountain was published by Lippincott. Hurston worried about the book in letters to friends, but was comforted when somebody whose opinion she respected praised her work. Moses represented a departure from what she had written in the past, as well as a genre of fiction that represented a risk. Reviews for the novel were mixed, primarily because readers did not know what to do with such a hybrid—this combination of the well-known slave-turned-leader of his people, the one who dared to face old Pharaoh and demand him to let his people go, and the Moses trained in the stable by Mentu, who taught him to understand the language of animals.

In 1940 Bertram Lippincott approached Hurston about writing her autobiography. Dust Tracks on a Road appeared in 1942, but clearly, of all Hurston's published work, this endeavor represented her most complicated task. She moved to Los Angeles in the spring of 1941 and most likely began writing her life at that time, completing the task by summer. While the time she spent in the actual writing process is on par with her first five books, this book was less to the liking of her publishers. The original chapters that are housed in the Beinecke at Yale include more chapters than were used in the published version. Also, parts of various chapters were pulled from one place and inserted in another. Some parts became separate articles. Some entire chapters that she hoped to use were simply left out. According to Cheryl Wall, who has made a close study comparing the original chapters with the published version, she indicates that the deletions fall into three categories: “possibly libelous material, political opinion, and sexually explicit passages.”² Deletions in the book occur both in the original typescript and in the galley proofs. Wall concludes that editors cut almost 10 percent of the book before publishing it in November 1942.³ Hurston was more likely to endure the cuts than rewrite for editors' approval. The version of Dust Tracks on a Road published by the Library of America in 1995 is the first publication of the restored text. Careful notes in the back of this edition inform the reader of those restored parts of the text that were deleted in the 1942 published version. In spite of what must have been strong differences between Hurston and her editors, the autobiography won the Anisfeld-Wolf Book Award for the best book that year on race relations. This is the only one of Hurston's seven books to win an award in her lifetime.

Problems in the drafting stages with Dust Tracks on a Road launched a new and painful period, a considerable slowing down of Hurston's fast-track publishing speed. Also, she lost what appeared to be automatic acceptance with Lippincott. For a writer who had published six books in nine years, it took another six years to get what was to be her final novel published in 1948. She kept writing during these six years, but Lippincott started to reject her work. However, a new friendship with Florida writer Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings of The Yearling fame offered possibilities of help. In these days, friends were less abundant, less at the ready to step up to her aid, but Rawlings introduced Hurston to editors at her publisher, Scribner's. Hurston signed a contract for Seraph on the Suwanee with white Florida cracker protagonists. Hurston complied with revision requests from September until December 1947, met again with the editors in February, and completed the manuscript by March; the book appeared in October 1948.

The project that was to consume the final years of Hurston's life, the book that she labored on doggedly even after being rejected, her effort to re-cast the life of Herod the Great, tells much about Hurston's attitude towards revision. Her book on Herod was never published. The twelve volumes of burnt pages sit today in the archives at the University of Florida special collections room of the George Smathers Libraries. When she received a rejection, she did not rewrite, nor did she abandon this project. She was convinced of her own path, determined that the problem lay in the reader's mind. She “revised” by mailing a query letter to yet another publisher. Moments in the Herod text are repetitive—images that worked brilliantly in earlier novels re-appear, this time less successfully. Upon occasion, Hurston's sentences soar to the heights of her earlier days, but these fresh moments are rare. Her obsession with the tale kept getting in the way of effective telling.

Notes

1. Zora Neale Hurston, Mules and Men, in Folklore, Memoirs, and Other Writings, ed. Cheryl A. Wall (New York: Library of America, 1995), p. 3.

2. Cheryl Wall, “Notes on the Texts,” in Folklore, Memoirs, and Other Writings, p. 983.

3. Wall, “Notes on the Texts,” p. 983.