This Library of America volume, with its companion, brings together for the first time all of Zora Neale Hurston’s best writing in one authoritative set. When she died in poverty and obscurity in 1960, all of her books were out of print. Today Hurston’s groundbreaking works, suffused with the culture and traditions of African Americans and the poetry of black speech, have won her recognition as one of the most significant modern American writers. Hurston’s fiction is free-flowing and frequently experimental, exuberant in its storytelling and open to unpredictable and fascinating digressions.  Jonah’s Gourd Vine  (1934), based on the lives of her parents and evoking in rich detail the world of her childhood, recounts the rise and fall of a powerful preacher torn between spirit and flesh in an all-black town in Florida. “There is no book more important to me than this one,” novelist Alice Walker has written about  Their Eyes Were Watching God  (1937), Hurston’s lyrical masterpiece about a woman’s determined struggle for love and independence. In this, her most acclaimed work, she employs a striking range of tones and voices to give the story of Janie and Tea Cake the poetic intensity of a myth. In  Moses, Man of the Mountain  (1939), her high-spirited and utterly personal retelling of the Exodus story, Hurston again demonstrates her ability to use the black vernacular as the basis for a supple and compelling prose style. Seraph on the Suwanee  (1948), Hurston’s last major work, is set in turn-of-the-century Florida and portrays the passionate clash between a poor southern “cracker” and her willful husband. A selection of short stories (among them “Spunk,” “The Bone of Contention,” and “Story in Harlem Slang”) further displays Hurston’s unique fusion of folk traditions and literary modernism—comic, ironic, and soaringly poetic. The chronology of Hurston’s life prepared for this edition sheds fresh light on many aspects of her career. In addition, this volume contains detailed notes and a brief essay on the texts. LIBRARY OF AMERICA  is an independent nonprofit cultural organization founded in 1979 to preserve our nation’s literary heritage by publishing, and keeping permanently in print, America’s best and most significant writing. The Library of America series includes more than 300 volumes to date, authoritative editions that average 1,000 pages in length, feature cloth covers, sewn bindings, and ribbon markers, and are printed on premium acid-free paper that will last for centuries. This two-volume set brings together for the first time all of Hurston's best works: four novels, two books of folklore, and the first complete edition of her famous autobiography, Dust Tracks on a Road. Copyright 1994 Reed Business Information, Inc. Hurston flowered under the warming sun of the Harlem Renaissance, the black arts' explosion centered in Harlem in the 1920s and 1930s. After years of neglect, she died a forgotten figure, but her reputation blossomed anew in the late 1970s. Hurston's permanent place in the canon of U.S. literature is now assured, for her second novel, Their Eyes Were Watching God (1937), is considered a classic and is taught in the college classroom. The estimable Library of America series draws together between the covers of one volume all four of her novels and a goodly selection of her short stories. That she was mother to the likes of Alice Walker and Toni Morrison is tangible. It's obvious they learned from Hurston's use of black folklore as the mat{‚}eriel of her fiction and admire her richly soaring language, which is derived from black dialect. Her novels and stories--the latter a form she didn't use as effectively--relate the loves and woes of black and white people from in and around the southern communities she knew so well; one novel, Moses, Man of the Mountain (1939), has a biblical setting, and it's still an enrapturing interpretation of a story told many times before. Libraries without a complete set of Hurston's fiction will find this volume a necessary and easy purchase to fill that unfortunate gap. Brad Hooper This volume brings all of Hurston's works together under one cover for the first time, providing a rich blend of her novels and stories and including important notes and a brief essay on her style and contributions. This definitive Hurston reader is all the college-level library should require if only one work on Hurston were to be chosen. -- Midwest Book Review Zora Neale Hurston (1891-1960) was a novelist, short story writer, folklorist, and anthropologist and a major figure in the Harlem Renaissance best known for her 1937 novel Their Eyes Were Watching God . Cheryl A. Wall  is Zora Neale Hurston Professor of English at Rutgers University. She is the editor of  Changing Our Own Words: Essays on Criticism, Theory, and Writing by Black Women  and the author of  Worrying the Line .