Mules and Men.

"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). 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). 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).