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Three Plays Lawing and Jawing; Forty Yards; Woofing

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This book was converted from its physical edition to the digital format by a community of volunteers. You may find it for free on the web. Purchase of the Kindle edition includes wireless delivery.

24 pages, Kindle Edition

First published October 4, 2009

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About the author

Zora Neale Hurston

183 books5,482 followers
Novels, including Their Eyes Were Watching God (1937), and nonfiction writings of American folklorist Zora Neale Hurston give detailed accounts of African American life in the South.

In 1925, Hurston, one of the leaders of the literary renaissance, happening in Harlem, produced the short-lived literary magazine Fire!! alongside Langston Hughes and Wallace Thurman shortly before she entered Barnard College. This literary movement developed into the Harlem renaissance.

Hurston applied her Barnard ethnographic training to document African American folklore in her critically acclaimed book Mules and Men alongside fiction Their Eyes Were Watching God . She also assembled a folk-based performance dance group that recreated her Southern tableau with one performance on Broadway.

People awarded a Guggenheim fellowship to Hurston to travel to Haiti and conduct research on conjure in 1937. Her significant work ably broke into the secret societies and exposed their use of drugs to create the Vodun trance, also a subject of study for fellow dancer-anthropologist Katherine Dunham, then at the University of Chicago.

In 1954, the Pittsburgh Courier assigned Hurston, unable to sell her fiction, to cover the small-town murder trial of Ruby McCollum, the prosperous black wife of the local lottery racketeer, who had killed a racist white doctor. Hurston also contributed to Woman in the Suwanee County Jail , a book by journalist and civil rights advocate William Bradford Huie.

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Displaying 1 - 4 of 4 reviews
Profile Image for LaQuita Logan.
183 reviews
December 27, 2014
Quick Read

I wish Zora Neale was still here so she could finish writing these plays. Her ability to make Black life come alive is rivaled by no one.
1,265 reviews14 followers
January 9, 2019
Only the first play feels complete, but I love Zorah Neal Hurston’s gift for listening to her neighbors and transcribing it into beautiful prose. I wish more of this made it to the stage, and the theater, like literature, would have been all the richer for it.
Profile Image for Dawn.
123 reviews
August 2, 2020
Humorous! Loved Lawing and Jawing the best!
Profile Image for Rachel.
Author 2 books4 followers
April 21, 2012
Cute stories. Especially loved the banter in Forty Yards - "draining ugly from the river for 6 months" had me cracking up...
Displaying 1 - 4 of 4 reviews

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