Zora Neale Hurston and a History of Southern Life (Critical Perspectives on the Past)

A historian hoping to reconstruct the social world of all-black towns or the segregated black sections of other towns in the South finds only scant traces of their existence. In this book Tiffany Ruby Patterson uses the ethnographic and literary work of Zora Neale Hurston to augment the few official documents, newspaper accounts, and family records that pertain to these places hidden from history. Hurston's ethnographies, plays, and fiction focused on the day-to-day life in all-black social spaces as well as 'the Negro farthest down' in labor camps.Patterson shows how Hurston's work coincides with the fragmented historical record.