In the following excerpt, Howard discusses the manner in which Hurston explores the issue of marriage in "Spunk."

Now that the literary buffs are enthusiastically discovering or rediscovering Zora Neale Hurston (1903-1960), a black woman novelist and folklorist who, like many of her black contemporaries, failed to realize the bright promise of the Harlem Renaissance, a critical look at certain aspects of her fiction may be in order. During her lifetime, much of Hurston's erratic and short-lived fame rested on the publication of her two books of folklore, Mules and Men (1935) and Tell My Horse (1938), though she also published short stories, plays, essays, four novels—Jonah's Gourd Vine (1934), Their Eyes Were Watching God (1937), Moses, Man of the Mountain (1939), Seraph on the Suwanee (1948)— and an autobiography, Dust Tracks on a Road (1942). Part of her relative obscurity can be attributed to ill-founded criticism like that of Richard...