Jonah’s Gourd Vine.

NEALE HURSTON, Zora.

Item Number: 2671

Philadelphia: J.B. Lippincott, 1934.

First edition of the author’s first book. Octavo, original cloth. Inscribed by the author to Harold W. Thompson on the front free endpaper: “To / Dr. Thompson / a gold throne – angel / with shiny wings / Zora Neale Hurston.” Some fading to the cloth and worn at corners and spine ends, faint scar to front free endpaper in a price-clipped dust jacket that has some restoration to the spine panel and joints. Harold William Thompson was the author of Body, Boots, & Britches: Folktales, Ballads, and Speech from Country New York. Housed in a custom half morocco clamshell box. A nice association copy, uncommon in the original dust jacket.

Praised by Carl Sandburg as "a bold and beautiful book, many a page priceless and unforgettable." Written in only three to four months in 1934, Jonah's Gourd Vine is the first novel published by acclaimed anthropologist, writer, and Harlem Renaissance personality Zora Neale Hurston. The book, based loosely on her parents' lives, explores the life and consciousness of John Pearson and his relationship with his wife Lucy Potts and other women in the town. Pearson was depicted as a minister in a small black Florida town, Eatonville, which in reality was Hurston's hometown. In Hurston's work one hears and feels the authentic voice, power, and sensibilities of people and places. In this novel, she used events from her childhood and the sermons she heard as a preacher's daughter to give structure and texture to this novel.