Zora Neale Hurston Research Paper

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Why Zora Neale Hurston Should be Required Reading for American Literature Students
A great man once wrote: “We need more interaction that makes us understand what it was really like to be there. The choices, the struggles, the good times, and the bad times, and what inspired people to write the things that were written during certain historical periods” (Jones). Zora Neale Hurston has a writing style that fulfills these criteria.
Taking an American Literature class is equal to embarking on a chronological journey. Historically, writers will emerge from any given time frame, giving us insight to the conditions of the time and “what is was really like to be there”. As our country has matured, we have been witness to many “growing pains”; the greatest of which has been racial inequality. In order to address the symptoms, our country needed an understanding of the disease. In addition, we needed untainted accounts; not written in bias form.
“We have been left long enough to gather the character of slavery from the involuntary evidence of the masters”-Wendell Phillips. Authors such as Harriet Jacobs and Frederick Douglass illuminated for us what it was like to be a slave. However, the struggles of racial imbalances did not end with the Emancipation …show more content…

I relate best to the stories that seem more as if we are seated around a campfire, and someone is narrating a tale. As a writer, this is how we grab the reader, and this is how the reader becomes submersed in the story. This is why we need to include Hurston. After reading Hurston’s “The Eatonville Anthology”, I felt as if I knew the whole darn village; and her use of dialect serves to create a feel as if we know the characters personally, not from an outsider point of view. Having been introduced to the characters of Eatonville, we learn that Hurston is a master of observation, and indeed an

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