Mules and Men.

HURSTON, Zora Neale.

$50,000.00

Item Number: 141573

Philadelphia: J.B. Lippincott Company, 1935.

First edition of Hurston’s classic work, “the most engaging, genuine, and skillfully written book in the field of folklore” (Alan Lomax). Octavo, original cloth, with 10 illustrations by Miguel Covarrubias. Presentation copy, inscribed by the author on the half-title page, “To Mrs. Scott One of God’s best angels Zora Neale Hurston Port-au-Prince, Haiti, Dec. 20, 1936.” Introduction by Franz Boas. In very good condition with a large portion of the front panel of the original dust jacket tipped in opposite the title page, a small original photograph of Zora Neal Hurston laid in and her obituary tipped in which notes that she “died in obscurity and poverty on January 28, 1960.” Additional newspaper clippings related to Hurston tipped in at front and rear. Embossed bookplate. Housed in a custom half morocco clamshell box made by the Harcourt Bindery. Rare and desirable. First editions of any of Hurston’s books are rare, presentation copies exceedingly so.

"Hurston's influence on African literary tradition continues to grow," and Mules and Men remains "a key text in African American literary and cultural studies" (Wall in African American Writers, 175). Even amidst the brilliance of the Harlem Renaissance, Hurston's "presence was legendary." Trained as an anthropologist at Barnard, she studied with Franz Boas, who "recognized her genius immediately." On returning to her home state of Florida, Eatonville and New Orleans, she began "exploring the ways black history affected folk narratives." Offering several versions to publishers from 1929 to 1934, "the book's core—70 folktale texts—remained the same… [but] not until her first novel, Jonah's Gourd Vine, had been accepted by Lippincott's did Mules and Men find a publisher." While some questioned her refusal to focus on black resentment of whites, Hurston was "determined to prove that black people did not devote their lives to a morose discussion of white injustice." To Hurston, black folk traditions were always the "more beautiful, the more viable, the more human tradition" (Hemenway, 6, 60-63, 159-63, 221-26). To Alice Walker, who discovered Hurston through Mules and Men, she was "The Genius of the South"—words Walker engraved on Hurston's gravestone. "When I read Mules and Men, I was delighted. Here was the perfect book." To Walker, it embodied "the quality I feel in most characteristic of Zora's work… black people as complete, complex, undiminished human beings"(emphasis in original, Foreword, Hemenway, Zora Neale Hurston, xii).