Digital ACT Reading Practice Question #1596

The author indicates that Hurston's literary approach differed from that of peers like Alain Locke because Hurston: Passage Excerpt (Humanities): During the height of the Harlem Renaissance, while peers like Alain Locke championed high-bourgeois literature intended to demonstrate Black intellectual parity to white society, novelist and trained anthropologist Zora Neale Hurston took a radically different path. In her masterwork Their Eyes Were Watching God (1937), Hurston grounded her narrative voice in the lyrical, idiomatic African American vernacular speech of rural Eatonville, Florida. Male contemporaries, notably Richard Wright, scathingly condemned the novel, accusing Hurston of peddling minstrel nostalgia for white entertainment. Wright failed to perceive that Hurston was not catering to external approval; she was celebrating the autonomy, imaginative richness, and internal communal life of rural Black women, creating literature that drew power from lived oral tradition rather than protest polemics.