I Love Myself: When I Am Laughing...and Then Again When I Am Looking Mean and Impressive

This is a collection of work from the novelist Zora Neale Hurston. It contains fourteen remarkable selections from a writer who produced novels, essays and letters from 1920 - 1950. It is an anthology of works that provides a wonderful insight into American social and cultural history as well as offering an incredible mental picture of the woman - Hurston. The book is edited by Alice Walker.In 2007 the Guardian newspaper asked women to recommend a book that had made an impact on them as women. Zadie Smith wrote passionately about Hurston's Their Eyes Were Watching God and how, having read this book, her life and writing had been enriched. I feel at last here was recognition for a black woman writer who Alice Walker describes as "a woman ahead of her time The book is an extraordinary journey through the title. Hurston writes about black American `folk art' that is questioning and without apology. In the words of Alice Walker "the language of the characters, that `dialect' that has been laughed at, denied or ignored, or `improved' so that white folks ......can understand it is simply beautiful". Hurston's writing is mean and impressive and she challenges the reader to think and go back and think again - about the meaning of her words. You find yourself asking: is she challenging the `politics' of the day in Crazy for This Democracy, or is she an artist of words, challenging assumptions about ethnicity and culture in What White Publishers Won't Print? I have dipped into this book over the years and never cease to be amazed and thankful for a language that is rich in meaning and colour, never dull and always inspirational and always able to provide a quote or a text that has meaning for today's readers. I do not think this anthology is now in print. However, other works of Hurston are and readers are to be encouraged to go and seek them out. This is what Hurston had to say about herself, "I couldn't see it for wearing it. It was only when I was off in college, away from my native surroundings, that I could see myself like somebody else and stand off and look at my garment". Again she captured the art of critical reflection in a way that I couldn't.

I am using this text as mainly research for an honors thesis I am writing for my Undergraduate English major. Although it was extremely helpful making connections and describing Hurston the author, it was also extremely enjoyable, holding not only critical essays but exerpts as well. I'd recommend it to any Hurston fan.

Zora Neal Hurston was an iconoclast. In her time her career suffered because she wasn't interested in writing the kind of stuff Langston Hughes and Richard Wright were churning out. The editors of this collection of excerpts of her major works are a lot like her critics. They try mightily to portray Zora as something she was not and are puzzled by Zora's statements that seem pretty straightforward to me. Read Zora's stories, folklore and especially the excerpt from her biography and skip the commentary.