Читать книгу Constructing the Self. Essays on Southern Life-Writing онлайн

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The same arguments of individualism as the guiding force in the impulse to writing a life narrative might be applied to Zora Neale Hurston. Born in Alabama and bred in Florida, Washington, D.C. and New York, Hurston had published five books by 1940, which made her an exception not only among African American women writers, but among African American writers in general. Her success led her publisher, Bertram Lippincott, to insist that Hurston pen her life story. After extensive delays, during which she asserted that writing about one’s life was almost too daunting a task to undertake, Hurston did indeed complete her life narrative and published it as Dust Tracks on a Road in 1942. In the process, Hurston created a narrative that is so individualistic that scholars have difficulty in deciphering some of the visions that she claims shaped her life. Rather than focus exclusively on race or agitating for transformed southern race relations, Hurston spends quite a bit of time illustrating that she is, like Wright, an exception among so-called Negroes. That exceptionalism begins with her recounting of her birth, and it continues throughout her narrative.