Volume 25, Number 20 · December 21, 1978
In Sorrow's Kitchen
By Darryl Pinckney
Zora Neale Hurston: A Literary Biography
by Robert E. Hemenway
University of Illinois Press, 371 pp., $15.00
Mules and Men
by Zora Neale Hurston, preface by Franz Boas
Indiana University Press, 291 pp., $4.95 (paper)
In the years after World War I blacks began to migrate to the North and its imagined freedoms in great numbers—'Russian' came to mean a black who had rushed from the South. Along with them came the 'Jazz Age' of the Charleston and the Black Bottom, of the musical hit Shuffle Along with Josephine Baker in the chorus, and of Scarlet Sister Mary with Ethel Barrymore in blackface. It was also the time of the 'Harlem Renaissance' and the 'New Negro,' when more books were published by blacks than ever before and more whites wrote about blacks than have ever done since. Langston Hughes wrote in his autobiography, The Big Sea: 'I had a swell time while it lasted. But I thought it wouldn't last long…. For how could a large and enthusiastic number of people be crazy about Negroes forever?'
Review, 3643 words
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