Author Guide · Fiction, Folklore & Memoir
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In 1973 the novelist Alice Walker walked through an overgrown, once-segregated cemetery in Fort Pierce, Florida, looking for an unmarked grave. Zora Neale Hurston had been buried there in 1960, after dying in a county welfare home, and all her books were out of print. Walker paid for a headstone calling her “A Genius of the South”, and her 1975 essay in Ms. magazine started a revival that has never stopped. Hurston, born in Alabama in 1891 and raised in Eatonville, Florida, one of the first all-Black towns in the United States, studied anthropology under Franz Boas, collected folk tales and songs across the South and the Caribbean, and published seven books in her lifetime. Two more have appeared since 2018. This guide covers her 9 key books, in order, and where to begin.
By Lisanne Swart · 9 key books · 1934–2020 · Updated October 2026
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Quick answer
Zora Neale Hurston’s best-known book is Their Eyes Were Watching God (1937). Her other key books are the novels Jonah’s Gourd Vine (1934), Moses, Man of the Mountain (1939) and Seraph on the Suwanee (1948), the folklore books Mules and Men (1935) and Tell My Horse (1938), her autobiography Dust Tracks on a Road (1942), and two published after her death, Barracoon (2018) and Hitting a Straight Lick with a Crooked Stick (2020). Start with Their Eyes Were Watching God. Below are all nine in order, and how she was forgotten and found again.
Where to Start with Zora Neale Hurston
If you want the novel everyone means
→ Their Eyes Were Watching God (1937) — Janie Crawford’s three marriages and the 1928 hurricane.
If you want the folklore she collected
→ Mules and Men (1935) — tall tales from Eatonville and hoodoo in New Orleans.
If you want a true story in one man’s own words
→ Barracoon (2018) — the last known survivor of the Atlantic slave trade to the US.
If you want her short fiction
→ Hitting a Straight Lick with a Crooked Stick (2020) — 21 stories, eight of them rediscovered.
9 Zora Neale Hurston Books, in Order
Jonah’s Gourd Vine
Her first novel, published by J. B. Lippincott. John Buddy Pearson leaves Alabama for Eatonville, Florida, where he becomes a celebrated preacher and the town’s mayor, while his affairs wreck his marriage to Lucy. John and Lucy share the first names of Hurston’s parents and follow her family’s own route from Notasulga, Alabama, to Eatonville. Reviewers praised its dialect and folklore.
Mules and Men
The folklore she gathered as an anthropologist, with a preface by her teacher Franz Boas. The first part sets about seventy folk tales, of John, Brer Rabbit and other tricksters, inside scenes of the people telling them in Eatonville and the sawmill camps of Polk County, Florida. The second part is her first-person account of studying hoodoo with practitioners in New Orleans. It received mixed reviews and went out of print until the 1970s revival.
Their Eyes Were Watching God
Written in about seven weeks in Haiti, during a Guggenheim Fellowship. Janie Crawford, back in Eatonville in her forties, tells her friend Phoeby about her three marriages: to the farmer Logan Killicks, to Joe Starks, the town’s controlling mayor, and to the younger drifter Tea Cake, with whom she works in the Everglades until the 1928 Okeechobee hurricane. Richard Wright dismissed it in New Masses; Time later named it one of the 100 best English-language novels published since 1923.
Tell My Horse
Her account of fieldwork in Jamaica and Haiti in 1936 and 1937, funded by Guggenheim Fellowships, covering politics, daily life and Vodou ceremonies. In Haiti she met and photographed Felicia Felix-Mentor, a woman said to have returned from the dead as a zombie; the photograph appeared in Life magazine.
Moses, Man of the Mountain
The Exodus story retold in the language and folklore of the Black American South, in which Moses is above all a man of great power whom Pharaoh takes for a hoodoo practitioner. Alain Locke called it a caricature; later critics have read it more kindly, as a study of power and leadership.
Dust Tracks on a Road
Her autobiography, from childhood in Eatonville to her years as a writer and folklorist. Lippincott made her cut passages before publication, including an attack on American imperialism in Asia; later editions restore some of them. It won the 1943 Anisfield-Wolf Book Award for its contribution to race relations.
Seraph on the Suwanee
Her last novel, and her only one about white characters, published by Scribner’s. Arvay Henson, from a poor West Florida town, marries the ambitious Jim Meserve, who makes money in turpentine, moonshine, citrus and shrimping. Reviews were mixed; The New York Times praised its portrait of Arvay, and critics found the ending melodramatic.
Barracoon
In 1927 Hurston travelled to Plateau, near Mobile, Alabama, to interview Cudjo Lewis (Oluale Kossola), then in his eighties, who had been brought from West Africa on the Clotilda, the last known slave ship to reach the United States. Publishers turned the manuscript down in the 1930s because it kept his dialect, and Hurston refused to change it. Amistad published it in 2018, edited by Deborah G. Plant, with a foreword by Alice Walker.
Hitting a Straight Lick with a Crooked Stick
Twenty-one stories, published by Amistad in January 2020, edited by M. Genevieve West. Eight of them, set in Harlem, had been lost in old periodicals and archives; the others include stories of rural Florida like those she was already known for. The Harlem stories show a city writer alongside the rural one readers knew.
In What Order to Read Zora Neale Hurston
None of Hurston’s books continues another, but they talk to each other. Read Their Eyes Were Watching God first, then Mules and Men: many of the porch stories, sayings and rhythms in the novel come from the folklore she had already collected in Eatonville. Jonah’s Gourd Vine is the same town a generation earlier, seen through a version of her father.
Dust Tracks on a Road is best read after a few of the others, since she often tells the same events differently there, and it was cut by her publisher. Of the books published after her death, Barracoon stands on its own as history; Hitting a Straight Lick with a Crooked Stick is the best way into her short fiction. Leave Seraph on the Suwanee until last.
A reading path
1. Their Eyes Were Watching God (1937)
2. Mules and Men (1935)
3. Barracoon (2018)
4. Hitting a Straight Lick with a Crooked Stick (2020)
5. Dust Tracks on a Road (1942)
Everything Else Zora Neale Hurston Published
Beyond the 9 key books: 10 more, grouped by kind.
Open a group with the + to see every book in it.
Collections and editions published after her death
7
7 books · 1979–2022
- 1979I Love Myself When I Am Laughinga reader edited by Alice Walker
- 1981The Sanctified Churchessays on Black religious practice and folklore
- 1985Spunkselected stories
- 1995The Complete Storiesher short fiction in one volume
- 2001Every Tongue Got to Confessfolk tales from the Gulf States
- 2003Zora Neale Hurston: A Life in Lettersedited by Carla Kaplan
- 2022You Don’t Know Us Negroes and Other Essaysintroduction by Henry Louis Gates Jr.
Plays and an unfinished novel
3
3 books · 1991–2025
- 1991Mule Bonea comedy written with Langston Hughes in 1930, first staged in 1991; the collaboration ended their friendship
- 2008Collected Plays
- 2025The Life of Herod the Greatan unfinished novel from the 1950s, with commentary by Deborah G. Plant
The years · 1891–2018
Quick facts about Zora Neale Hurston
- Known for
- Hurston is known for writing the speech, stories and songs of Black Southern communities into both her fiction and her anthropology, above all in Their Eyes Were Watching God (1937).
- 1891
- Born in Notasulga, Alabama
- 1928
- BA in anthropology, Barnard College
- 1960
- Dies in Fort Pierce, Florida
- 1975
- Alice Walker’s essay in Ms. revives her work
- 2018
- Barracoon
- Born
- 7 January 1891, Notasulga, Alabama; grew up in Eatonville, Florida
- Died
- 28 January 1960, Fort Pierce, Florida, aged 69
- Education
- Howard University; Barnard College, BA in anthropology (1928); graduate study with Franz Boas at Columbia
- Fieldwork
- Florida, New Orleans, Jamaica, Haiti and Honduras; the Federal Writers’ Project in Florida, 1938–1939
- Honours
- Guggenheim Fellowships (1936, 1937); Anisfield-Wolf Book Award (1943)
- Rediscovered
- By Alice Walker, who marked her grave in 1973 and wrote “In Search of Zora Neale Hurston” (1975)
The red mark is 1937: Their Eyes Were Watching God, the novel she wrote in Haiti in about seven weeks.
How Zora Neale Hurston Writes: The Ear of an Anthropologist
Hurston trained as an anthropologist before she published a novel, and it shows in what she listens for. Mules and Men records tales the way people told them on porches and in work camps, interruptions and jokes included, and her novels are built from the same material: sermons in Jonah’s Gourd Vine, the porch talk of Eatonville in Their Eyes Were Watching God.
Her most distinctive choice is to keep two voices on the page. The narration in Their Eyes is lyrical standard English; the characters speak in the Black Southern dialect she had written down in the field, and the two blur as Janie finds her own voice. She held to that choice when it cost her: publishers rejected Barracoon because it kept Cudjo Lewis’s speech, and she would not rewrite it.
It also drew the sharpest criticism of her career. Richard Wright wrote that she seemed to have “no desire whatsoever to move in the direction of serious fiction”, and Alain Locke wanted more social protest. Hurston wrote about Black life from the inside, on its own terms, rather than mainly as a response to white racism, which is one reason later writers, from Alice Walker to Toni Morrison, read her as a forerunner.
Watch
Hear Zora Neale Hurston sing “Halimuhfack”
No interview film of Hurston is known, but in 1939, at a recording session she arranged at the Clara White Mission in Jacksonville for the Federal Writers’ Project, she sang “Halimuhfack”, a juke song she had learned on Florida’s east coast, and explained how she collected songs. The original recordings are at the Library of Congress.
Frequently asked questions about Zora Neale Hurston’s books
How many books has Zora Neale Hurston written?
She published seven books in her lifetime: four novels, two books of folklore and anthropology, and an autobiography. Two more key books appeared after her death, Barracoon (2018) and Hitting a Straight Lick with a Crooked Stick (2020), making the nine on this page. Further collections, plays, letters and an unfinished novel are listed in the bibliography.
What are Zora Neale Hurston’s books in order?
Jonah’s Gourd Vine (1934), Mules and Men (1935), Their Eyes Were Watching God (1937), Tell My Horse (1938), Moses, Man of the Mountain (1939), Dust Tracks on a Road (1942), Seraph on the Suwanee (1948), Barracoon (2018) and Hitting a Straight Lick with a Crooked Stick (2020).
Where should I start with Zora Neale Hurston?
With Their Eyes Were Watching God. If you prefer nonfiction, start with Barracoon, her interviews with Cudjo Lewis; for short fiction, Hitting a Straight Lick with a Crooked Stick.
What is Zora Neale Hurston’s most famous book?
Their Eyes Were Watching God (1937). Time included it in its 2005 list of the 100 best English-language novels published since 1923, and the BBC put it on its 2019 list of the 100 most influential novels.
How did Alice Walker rediscover Zora Neale Hurston?
In 1973 Walker went to Fort Pierce, Florida, found the unmarked grave in the Garden of Heavenly Rest where Hurston had been buried in 1960, and paid for a headstone reading “A Genius of the South”. Her essay “In Search of Zora Neale Hurston”, in the March 1975 issue of Ms., brought Hurston’s out-of-print books back to readers. In 1979 Walker edited a Hurston reader, I Love Myself When I Am Laughing.
What is Barracoon about, and why was it published in 2018?
It is Hurston’s account of her 1927 interviews with Cudjo Lewis (Oluale Kossola), one of the people brought to Alabama on the Clotilda, the last known slave ship to reach the United States. Publishers in the 1930s wanted her to replace his dialect with standard English; she refused, and the manuscript stayed unpublished until Amistad brought it out in 2018.
Has Their Eyes Were Watching God been adapted?
Yes. A 2005 television film directed by Darnell Martin, produced by Oprah Winfrey’s Harpo Productions with a teleplay by Suzan-Lori Parks, starred Halle Berry as Janie. There have also been stage versions and BBC radio adaptations.
Why does Zora Neale Hurston’s birth year vary?
She was born on 7 January 1891, but from about 1917 she gave her birth year as 1901, which let her enrol in free public high school at 26. The headstone Alice Walker placed in 1973 says 1901.
Did Zora Neale Hurston win any prizes?
Dust Tracks on a Road won the 1943 Anisfield-Wolf Book Award for its contribution to race relations. She also received Guggenheim Fellowships in 1936 and 1937 for her fieldwork in Jamaica and Haiti.
Why was Zora Neale Hurston controversial in her later years?
Two episodes. In 1948 she was arrested in New York and charged with molesting a boy; she showed she had been in Honduras at the time, and the case was dismissed in 1949, but newspaper coverage badly damaged her. In August 1955 she wrote to the Orlando Sentinel opposing the Supreme Court’s school desegregation ruling in Brown v. Board of Education, arguing that “the whole matter revolves around the self-respect of my people”. The letter was widely criticised at the time and is still debated.
Footnotes
- Zora Neale Hurston — Wikipedia
- Their Eyes Were Watching God — Wikipedia
- Zora Neale Hurston career timeline — PBS American Masters
- Barracoon — Wikipedia
- Zora Neale Hurston’s Letter to the Orlando Sentinel (1955) — BlackPast
- Zora Neale Hurston and the WPA in Florida — Florida Memory
Bibliography last verified 9 October 2026. Where sources give different first-publication years, this page uses the year in library catalogues or the publisher’s own record.
This list was not put together by a machine.
The notes are all mine,
and the books are all hers.
Lisanne x
Written by Lisanne Swart, who has curated reading lists and author guides at lisanneswart.com since 2021.
See more on her personal bookshelf.
“No, I do not weep at the world—I am too busy sharpening my oyster knife.”
— Zora Neale Hurston, “How It Feels to Be Colored Me”, The World Tomorrow (1928)
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