Alice Walker and Zora Neale Hurston: The Common Bond

While Alice Walker and Zora Neale Hurston are often linked together, few scholars have looked critically and systematically at what the two actually have in common. This study documents the many ways that Hurston has influenced Walker and demonstrates how Walker, by taking the best of Hurston and making it live in striking new ways, has accorded Hurston a literary immortality apart from that which Hurston earned in her own right. In so doing, Walker has also laid a solid foundation for her own literary reputation. Eleven African-American scholars have contributed their appraisals of this common bond, concentrating on parallels between Hurston’s Their Eyes Were Watching God and Walker’s The Color Purple ; and Walker’s tribute to Hurston, Zora Neale A Cautionary Tale and a Partisan View , is reprinted.