BAUMAN RARE BOOKS 26 32HURSTON, Zora Neale. Mules and Men. Philadelphia, 1935. Octavo, original brown cloth, custom clamshell box. $38,000 First edition of Hurston’s first non-fiction work, inscribed to a fellow folklorist, “To Dr. Thompson—who plays high trombone in God’s best band. With admiration, Zora Neale Hurston.” To Alice Walker, Hurston 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). “The first popular book about Afro-American folklore ever written by a black scholar, Mules and Men so compellingly displays the rich imaginative life in a black community that Alan Lomax has called it ‘the most engaging, genuine, and skillfully written book in the field of folklore.’” Even amidst the brilliance of the Harlem Renaissance, Hurston’s “presence was legendary.” 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” (Hemenway, 6, 6063, 159-63). Without rarely found dust jacket. Harold William “Tommy” Thompson was the co-founder of the New York Folklore Society and a professor at Cornell University. Text and illustrations fine, inner paper hinges starting but sound, only mild wear to edges and spine. A highly desirable extremely good inscribed copy. “The First Popular Book About Afro-American Folklore Ever Written By A Black Scholar”
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