Zora Neale Hurston Books: Lost for Decades, Essential Forever

Tue, 16 Jun 2026 06:00:00 -0500

There was a man who came into my shop on Ninth Street sometime in the mid-nineties. He was in his sixties, a retired postal worker, and he’d been coming in every few months for years. He read broadly and without a plan, which I’ve always considered a sign of a healthy reading life. That afternoon he picked up a copy of Their Eyes Were Watching God off the table where I kept the books I was pushing that week, turned it over, read the back, and said: “Who is this?” I told him. He said, “How come I’ve never heard of her?” I didn’t have a short answer for that. I told him to buy the book and come back when he’d finished it.

Zora Neale Hurston on Sunday Evening Review

Zora Neale Hurston Books: Lost for Decades, Essential Forever