#ThrowbackThursday: I LOVE MYSELF WHEN I AM LAUGHING
This fall, our archival intern Monika Zaleska will offer a glimpse back into FP’s collection, using correspondence, documents, and clips from our extensive archive. Monika is a PhD student in the CUNY Graduate Center’s Comparative Literature Program, and is working with FP through a grant from Publics Lab.
You can follow her on Twitter at @myszka_mz and check out her weekly posts here and on the FP instagram.
When FP first published its reader of Zora Neale Hurston’s work I Love Myself When I Am Laughing..., edited by Alice Walker, Hurston was being “reevaluated as a major American writer,” as noted in the Sunday, February 17th issue of The Philadelphia Inquirer that I found this week in our archives.
Hurston’s work explored Black life in the South, such as her most famous novel Their Eyes Were Watching God. She grew up in Eatonville, Florida, one of the first self-governing, all-Black municipalities in the United States, now home to the Zora Neale Hurston Museum. Also found in the FP archives: a flyer for the first annual Eatonville Zora Neale Hurston Festival of the Arts in 1990, pictured above.
Much of this revived interest in Hurston was due to the work of writer Alice Walker, who considered her an important influence. In the 1970s, Walker rediscovered Hurston’s unmarked grave and collected her writing from the first half of the 20th century: novels, poetry, and polemic essays such as “How It Feels to Be Colored Me,” first published in 1928. Walker edited and promoted FP’s reader of Hurston’s work, first published in 1979. She also located the 1930s photographs that Carl Van Vechten took of Zora Neale Hurston, laughing and looking “mean and impressive,” the inspiration for the FP reader title.
“Everyone at home is so excited about the book + so happy about it. I am just astonished. Call me, Alice” (A 1979 letter from Alice Walker to FP Editor Liz Phillips, on the Hurston anthology)
By the 90s, Hurston was being taught in college classrooms around the country and Oprah Winfrey had bought the film rights to Their Eyes Were Watching God. But Alice Walker first encountered Hurston many years earlier in a Black literature course in college—as a footnote to more famous male writers. In I Love Myself When I Am Laughing...Hurston’s work is finally the main event.
In her introduction, Walker writes:
...many of us love Zora Neale Hurston. We do not love her for her lack of modesty....we do not love her for her unpredictable and occasionally weird politics...We love Zora Neale Hurston for her work, first, and...we love her for herself.
So I may as well let Zora speak for herself, and have the last word of this trip to the archives:
Monika Zaleska is a writer, translator, and PhD student in comparative literature at the CUNY Graduate Center. She has an MFA from Brooklyn College, where she served as fiction editor of The Brooklyn Review, and currently teaches in the English department.