SOURCE: Hurd, Myles Raymond. “What Goes Around Comes Around: Characterization, Climax, and Closure in Hurston's ‘Sweat’.” Langston Hughes Review 12, no. 2 (fall 1993): 7-15.

In the following essay, Hurd offers a thematic and stylistic analysis of “Sweat.”

Shortly after her 1925 arrival in New York City from Washington, D.C., and her native Eatonville, Florida, Zora Neale Hurston sought to make her literary presence known by entering a contest in creative writing sponsored by Charles S. Johnson, editor of Opportunity, and by having one of her prize-winning fictions reprinted in Alain Locke's The New Negro (1925). Inspired by the encouragement of these well-known Black editors, Hurston felt confident enough in 1926 to join forces with Wallace Thurman and Langston Hughes in coediting Fire!!, a journal designed to “epater le bourgeois into a realization of the existence of the younger Negro writers and artists” by “burn[ing] up a lot of the old, dead...