Every day brings a new story. And each day contributes to the art of story telling -- in prose and poetry, in music, on the stage, on the screen, and, of course, in books.
Today is the story of January 7th.
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It is the seventh day of the year, leaving 358 days remaining in 2022.
Hurston, whomoved to New York in 1925, was a central figure in the ongoing Harlem Renaissance of that period. Along with several other young Black writers, including the poet Langston Hiughes and the novelist Wallace Thurman, she helped launch the Black literary magazine Fire!! It was a controversal publication in the community, and it lasted one issue.
Hurston continued to study anthropology, with a particulart interest in African-American and Caribbean culture. Her novels and short stories focused on comtemporary Black culture, the Black expereince, and her own struggles as an African-American woman.
Her writings often relied heavily on Black dialect, for which she was criticized during her time, and partly lead to her novels and stories going out of style later in her life and after her death in 1960. Many in the Black community were uncomfortable with the dialect, saying it was a caricature of Black speech and a legacy of white racism. She said she was striving to use the speech patterns of people from the time period in which she was writing, based on her own deep studies,
After she died, though, several African-American writers, including Alice Walker, helped revive her works, including her best known novel, Their Eyes Were Watching God. Several of her works -- Every Tongue Got to Confess, a collection of folk tales she gathered in the 1920s, and Barracoon: The Story of the Last "Black Cargo," about the Atlantic Slave Trade -- were only published after her death.
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