Zora Neale Hurston has experienced a rare posthumous fame. When she died in a Florida nursing home in 1960, her work as a Harlem Renaissance writer — including her most famous book, Their Eyes Were Watching God — had long been forgotten. Even worse for her literary reputation was the fact that she was a conservative. That ensured that the intellectuals who admired such ultra-left figures as W. E. B. Du Bois, Richard Wright, and Langston Hughes took little interest in her. Her passing went largely unnoticed in the literary world, therefore, and many of her papers were burned by nurses who didn’t know she’d been a writer.

Fifteen years later, novelist Alice Walker sparked a revival of interest in Hurston, and today she sells half a million copies every year. Her popularity creates a conundrum for some literary gatekeepers, who have dealt with her politically inconvenient views by downplaying the fact that she was an anti-communist, an anti–New Dealer, and even an anti-desegregationist.

In 2020, Genevieve West edited an anthology of Hurston’s short stories, Hitting a Straight Lick with a Crooked Stick, for which West wrote a long introduction that struggled to fit Hurston into the critical-studies mold. Hurston “subversively critiques the politics of race and gender,” she claimed; one fictional character “resists traditional gender roles”; another seeks to “reclaim her agency” after “construct[ing] herself as an object of the male gaze” — et cetera, et cetera. But the nonfiction articles that West and Henry Louis Gates Jr. have gathered in this new collection make clear that such jargon comes nowhere near describing a writer who, above all else, thought for herself.

Hurston’s doubts about the leftist politics of her contemporaries were rooted in the individualism she learned from her mother, who inculcated Booker T. Washington’s gospel of self-reliance in her children. Hurston was therefore startled, when she moved to Harlem in the Twenties, to discover the contempt with which that doctrine was viewed by the cadre of poets, playwrights, and novelists who followed Du Bois in thinking that black authors should devote themselves to overthrowing capitalism and writing what they proudly called “race propaganda.”

Hurston refused to comply. She thought communism offered nothing to black Americans; the party was just using them “as the mud-sills of the proposed American peasant party,” as she wrote in a 1951 essay, and to instruct aspiring black writers to devote themselves to agitprop would strangle their creativity. In a 1938 article called “Art and Such,” she imagined the dilemma of the black poet:

Can the black poet sing a song to the morning? Upsprings the song to his lips but it is fought back. He says to himself, . . . “Ought I not to be singing of our sorrows? That is what is expected of me and . . . if I do not some will even call me a coward. The one subject for a Negro is the Race and its sufferings and so the song of the morning must be choked back. I will write of a lynching instead.” So the same old theme, the same old phrases get done again. . . . The writer thinks that he has been brave in following in the groove of the Race champions, when the truth is, it is the line of least resistance and least originality.

Hurston — who, unlike Du Bois, Hughes, and Wright, actually lived in the segregated South — thought propaganda literature was counterproductive. “If our ‘friends’ portray us as sub-human varmints,” she wrote in her memoir, Dust Tracks on a Road, “the indifferent majority can only conclude that we are hopeless. They have laid down the proposition that we have no ability to survive in this civilization. I know different, and you do too.”

Loathing what she called “the Race man,” whose “job today is to rush around seeking for something he can ‘resent,’” Hurston broke with the Harlem Renaissance writers, particularly after Wright published a review of Their Eyes that likened it to a minstrel show. Hurston shot back with a review of Wright’s next book: The solution to racism that he offered was “the solution of the PARTY,” she declared, “state responsibility for everything and individual responsibility for nothing, not even feeding oneself.”

She despised segregation, and in a powerful essay called “My Most Humiliating Jim Crow Experience,” she described a 1931 incident when she consulted a white doctor over a stomach illness; he insisted on examining her in a broom closet. “I got up, set my hat at a reckless angle and walked out,” she recalled, “telling him that I would send him a check, which I never did.”

But disgusting as racism was, she also could not abide what she called “bellyaching” by its victims, or the idea that they should devote their lives to political activism instead of finding ways to pursue happiness regardless of white hatred. Nor could she stand the condescending attitude of whites who seemed to think their pity was the solution to all black ills. As Gates and West note in their introduction, Hurston thought that “to see black people as victims” was “to succumb to the ultimate form of anti-black racism.” Thus when Brown v. Board of Education was decided, she called it “insulting” because the Supreme Court was implying that blacks’ greatest desire was “forcible association” with whites.

She was equally unsparing of feminism. She declared in 1947 that although women had “entered every profession and skill that men follow for a living,” they had found neither success nor happiness because “the free life of the males” was simply not a rewarding experience for them. Certainly women could make it in the job market, she wrote, but “suppressed desire” for marriage and family “is always at our elbow, hunching and nudging us when we should be concentrating on business.” She urged women instead to reclaim “the three keys of feminine mystery” — the keys to the kitchen, the cradle, and the bedroom — which would make them the actual “ruler[s] of the earth.” So much for Hurston “resisting traditional gender roles.”

Hurston’s own literature was firmly devoted to “singing a song to the morning,” and the essays gathered here are delightful examples of her eloquence and charm. But they also suggest a profounder dimension to her thought, one from which Americans today, white and black, could profit. Trained in anthropology at Columbia University, she spent years researching southern folkways and came to believe that the heart of black culture — the real stuff, not the caricature found in race propaganda — was the principle of individualism.

That individualism was especially personified in High John de Conquer, the mythological figure she described in an especially fine 1943 essay. A trickster character invented to help slaves survive the horrors of bondage, John was a “hope-bringer” who helped keep “the soul of the black man whole and free” even in the face of the vilest oppression. According to the legends, John fooled slave masters, taught pride to slaves, and worked magic for the needy. He married the Devil’s youngest daughter and turned the fires of hell into a barbecue pit, before visiting heaven, where he led a marching band up Hallelujah Street.

Most remarkably, Hurston observed, there were “no bitter tragic tales at all” in the John mythology. Instead, he represented “the power of love and laughter to win by their subtle power,” and Hurston was convinced that these qualities, like the rest of black culture, would ultimately transform white American society — not just destroying racism, but fashioning a new and better humanity. Thus she assured readers of the American Mercury that “if the news from overseas reads bad, . . . listen hard, and you will hear John de Conquer treading on his singing-drum. . . . Even if your hair comes yellow, and your eyes are blue, John de Conquer will be working for you just the same.”

Such bold Americanism makes her as unique today as her conservatism made her in the 1940s literary scene. Far from endorsing the racial separatism now fashionable among progressives, she thought blacks were so fundamentally American that they had built some of the essential components of what we now think of as the national spirit — particularly its joyous optimism and resilience — and that these qualities were impervious to the political nostrums of leftists who “simply will not see us as Americans, nourished on the same ideals as other Americans.”

One can only imagine what she would have said of writers such as Ta-Nehisi Coates, who contend that America is and has always been only for whites. As for the 1619 Project, we need not guess. “I see nothing but futility in looking back over my shoulder in rebuke at the grave of some white man,” she wrote in her memoir. “While I have a handkerchief over my eyes crying over the landing of the first slaves in 1619, I might miss something swell that is going on in [the present].”

Hurston insisted that “Negro reality is a hundred times more imaginative and entertaining than anything that has ever been hatched up over a typewriter.” Likewise, her own social and political thought was vastly more subtle than anything critical-theory jargon can capture, and more constructive than today’s littérateurs are comfortable admitting. We are therefore fortunate that we can go straight to the inimitable source.