This expansive volume, in five parts, revises existing perceptions of Hurston, like her well-known opposition to school integration and Richard Wright’s objection to her use of African American vernacular. Essays...help to clarify Hurston’s previously misunderstood positions, rooting them in her deep appreciation for African American language and culture, her unquestionable commitment to people of color and their welfare on American soil.

... a dazzling collection of her work.

Five or six of these essays are obvious masterpieces of the form, their sting utterly intact. There’s a lot of filler here, too, though—mundane essays that, if you removed Hurston’s name, could have been written by anyone.

... a garden-fresh collection of Hurston’s nonfiction cocurated by Henry Louis Gates Jr. and Genevieve West. One can never have too much Zora in one’s intellectual diet. And these testimonies, tirades, reveries, and reportage—some of them never before published—forge a vibrant simulacrum of a ferociously independent, disarmingly mercurial sensibility whose complex legacy and even knottier personality we’re still trying to figure out decades after her death in 1960 at age sixty-nine. The reignited tensions of this new century likely will make her just as bemusing to contemporary readers, white and Black. But she has always made it fun for all of us to stick our heads in the game.

You Don't Know Us Negroes...oscillates effortlessly between folklore, Hurston’s reporting, and her essays.

This new collection of writings from Black author, scholar and cultural critic Zora Neale Hurston will introduce her to a new generation and give her the honor due—honor that was sometimes sparse in her lifetime—for her brilliant observations and deeply considered opinions.

... a new collection of Hurston’s essays demonstrates once again how ill suited she was to the role of a solemn and respectable author, the matriarch of black American fiction. In these essays, which cover themes of race, gender and politics, her writing is characterised by an impish relish that remains both shocking and invigorating today.

The essays demonstrate the wit of a pioneering star of the Black literary circle.

Hurston’s spats with leading male cultural and political luminaries, which exhibited her trademark blend of Southern eloquence and venom, are among the most engaging pieces.

You Don’t Know Us Negroes isn’t a book to take – or read – lightly.

... a must read, even though the collection is daunting. At four hundred pages, with an additional fifty pages of notes, the book isn’t attempting to be easily digestible in size or scope. Split into five sections, some essays read very quickly.

Throughout, Hurston’s use of allegory and metaphor is rife, but does not detract from her focused and pointed arguments.

Reading these essays requires letting go of the agonizing business of saving Hurston from her politics, as though the writer we credit with knowing so much of her own Negro mind just so happened to forget herself on occasions where the takes haven’t aged as well as we’d prefer.

Editors Gates and West have created a volume that enables readers both steeped in and new to Hurston to discover her acerbic wit, her crisp prose, and the breadth of her artistic ability and interests. From trial coverage to folktales, explorations of spirituals and debacles at Howard University, Hurston’s inquiries provide an opportunity to experience the evolution of her work in context with her better-known writings.

... showstopping.

A collection of Hurston’s trenchant, acerbic commentaries on Black life.