You Don't Know Us Negroes, and Other Essays Available to Purchase

I have been waiting for this book for over a dozen years. I could not figure out why such a prominent writer's collected essays had never been published when her stories, letters, plays, and folklore had all been assembled in book form. Well, now I know. Until the mid-1940s, Hurston turned out one good essay after another. “How It Feels to Be Colored Me” is perhaps the most brilliant, published in 1928. “Characteristics of Negro Expression” lays out Hurston's ideas on what makes Black communication unique. “Art and Such” is a sharp exploration of the history of African American art and writing. But most of the later essays are shockingly repulsive—and poorly written. After Hurston's greatest work had been pilloried by Black male writers such as Richard Wright, Ralph Ellison, Alain Locke, and Langston Hughes—and after she had been falsely accused of child abuse by her Harlem neighbors—she essentially became...