[It] would be hard to think of any writer in America in the twenties and early thirties more original and unusual than Julia Mood Peterkin. Obviously she wanted recognition, indeed fame; she worked toward that end with a dedicated seriousness. In her place and time the subjects she chose and the candor with which she approached them were considered outrageous….

Julia was the first American writer to tell stories of blacks who itched, laughed, tilled the soil, ate, lusted, grieved and died just like whites. People they were, among whom she walked every day. (p. 3)

Though the stories [gathered for The Collected Short Stories of Julia Peterkin] are largely episodic and anecdotal and told in dialect, a rereading of them today, by an eye accustomed to the new realism, shows that they take precedence in the realm of the explicit over the fashionable stream-of-conscious and writer-tells-all techniques of...