“THE FIRST POPULAR BOOK ABOUT AFRO-AMERICAN FOLKLORE EVER WRITTEN BY A BLACK SCHOLAR”: RARE FIRST EDITION OF ZORA NEALE HURSTON’S PIONEERING WORK, MULES AND MEN, WARMLY INSCRIBED BY HER

HURSTON, Zora Neale. Mules and Men. Philadelphia: J.B. Lippincott, 1935. Octavo, original brown cloth. Housed in a custom half morocco clamshell box. $38,000.

First edition of Hurston's first non-fiction work—"the perfect book" (Alice Walker)—hailed as "the most engaging, genuine, and skillfully written book in the field of folklore," a rare copy inscribed in red ink by her to a fellow folklorist, "To Dr. Thompson—who plays high trombone in God's best band. With admiration, Zora Neale Hurston."

To Alice Walker, who discovered Hurston through Mules and Men, she 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." Trained as an anthropologist at Barnard, she studied with Franz Boas, who "recognized her genius immediately." 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." While some questioned her refusal to focus on black resentment of whites, Hurston was "determined to prove that black people did not devote their lives to a morose discussion of white injustice." To Hurston, black folk traditions were always the "more beautiful, the more viable, the more human tradition" (Hemenway, 6, 60-63, 159-63, 221-26). "Hurston's influence on African literary tradition continues to grow," and Mules and Men remains "a key text in African American literary and cultural studies" (Wall in African American Writers, 175). Introduction by Franz Boas. With frontispiece, title-page vignette and eight illustrations by Miguel Covarrubias, many full page; musical scores and lyrics. Without rarely found dust jacket. Blockson 852. Jordan 323.13. Harold William "Tommy" Thompson (1891-1964) was the co-founder of the New York Folklore Society and a professor at Cornell University; his obituary in the Journal of American Folklore describes him as "a great folklorist, anthropologist, musician, author, and editor… one of the first folklorists to send out students to gather lore in their own environs" (Jagendorf, Vol. 77, No. 306). Front pastedown with "Thompson" in ink; traces of penciled annotations on back pastedown.

Text and illustrations fine, inner paper hinges starting but sound, only mild wear to edges and spine. A highly desirable extremely good inscribed copy.