Spunk" in The New Negro, The, An Interpretation.
An Early Hurston Work
Predating Their Eyes Were Watching God
By A Decade
Hurston, Zora Neale. “Spunk.” In The New Negro, An Interpretation. Edited by Alain Locke. Book Decoration and Portraits by Winold Reiss. New York: Albert and Charles Boni, (1927).
Thick 8vo.; illustrated, with a color frontispiece; blue paper-covered boards, white cloth spine.
First edition, second printing of the work that “defined and aimed the Harlem Renaissance movement”: Perry 772, #64 of Blockson’s 101 Influential Books. The perfect presentation copy, inscribed to the co-publisher: To Charles Boni, with original appreciation and gratitude, and profound interest, too, through the years, Alain Locke, Xmas, 1948. Includes among contributions by female writers works by Hurston, Countee Cullen, Jean Toomer and Arna Bontemps.
The New Negro, An Interpretation was published by Albert and Charles Boni in December 1925—the breathtaking selection of fiction, poetry, drama, music, folklore and historical essays seeming “not only to certify the existence of a great awakening in black America,” biographer Arnold Rampersad asserted, “but also to endow it with a Bible.” Langston Hughes, James Weldon Johnson and the other thirty-three distinguished contributors had aspired to infuse black literature and art with “Beauty” rather than “Propaganda,” contended Rhodes scholar Alain Leroy Locke (1886-1954), the principal exponent of the New Negro Movement.
W.E.B Du Bois, who had provided an exquisite essay on postwar racism and economic imperialism, differed with Locke, informing Crisis readers (January 1926) that the 452-page work was,
filled and bursting with propaganda but it is...beautifully and painstakingly done; and it is a grave question if ever in this world in any renaissance there can be a search for disembodied beauty which is not really a passionate effort to do something tangible, accompanied and illumined and made holy by the vision of eternal beauty.
Around the time that The New Negro, An Interpretation appeared, Locke and several other faculty “agitators” were dismissed from Howard University. Du Bois later rallied to his side, reassuring University trustee Jesse Edward Moorland that Locke, who had been on the faculty for over a dozen years, “is by long odds the best trained man among the younger American Negroes.” Subsequently reinstated, the philosophy professor determined to create, over the next two and half decades (as he had with his anthology), a “clearing house in America for information and counsel about the Negro people and their situation in the world.”
Hurston studied under Locke during her two years at Howard University. Under his tutelage, she published her first short fiction in the campus literary magazine.
At the time of this publication, the release of Hurston’s first book was over ten years away; ironically, Locke would attack Their Eyes Were Watching God in his review in Opportunity, the same journal which awarded her Second Prize in their 1925 short fiction contest for “Spunk,” the story appearing here.
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