Novel Report

Guidelines

• Write a one-paragraph biographical sketch of your author including the names of all works and dates published. 
 Example: Zora Neale Hurston was born in the all-Black town of Eatonville, Florida in 1903. When Zora was nine, her mother died, and she was left to roam from the house of one relative to that of another. At 16, Zora began work as a maid for a white singer in a theatrical company. She traveled to Baltimore where she enrolled at night in the high school department of Morgan College for two tears. Then she went to Howard University, where Alain Locke encouraged her writing efforts. She won a scholarship to Barnard College, where she studied under the famed anthropologist Franz Boas. After graduating in 1928, she spent the next four years in anthropological research in Harlem and the South., specializing in folklore. Zora has published an autobiography, Dust Tracks on a Road (1942); four novels, Jonah s Gourd Vine (1934), Their Eyes Were Watching God (1937), Moses, Man of the Mountain (1939) and Seraph on the Suwanee (1948); two volumes of folklore, Tell My Horse (1938) and Mules and Men (1935); and several plays. Toward the end of her life, she lived in poverty on Fort Pierce Florida, where she died as a ward of the state in 1960. 

• Give a one- paragraph summary of the novel you re reporting on. 
 Example: Summary of Hurston s Their Eyes Were Watching God -  Janie, an octoroon born out of wedlock, is the heroine of the story. After marrying an elderly farmer in order to please her grandmother, she deserts him in order to elope with Joe Starks to the colored town of Eatonville. Here Starks becomes landlord, storekeeper, and mayor, but develops such an absorption in self that he loses the affection of his wife. After Stark s death, Janie is wooed and won by Tea Cake, a happy-go-lucky gambler and itincrant worker with whom she finds love and happiness. Together they enjoy an adventurous life until Tea Cake, bitten by a mad dog during a Lake Okechobee hurricane, contracts hydrophobia. Forced to kill her maddened husband in order to save her own life, Janie is later exonerated and returns to Eatonville. 

• Give two critics opinion of your novel at the time the novel was published (completely document your reference). 


Example: Richard Wright complained bitterly about the minstrel image that he claimed Hurston was perpetrating. He admitted that her dialogue managed to catch the psychological movements of the Negro folk mind in their pure simplicity. He further states that her characters eat and laugh and cry and work and kill; they swing like a pendulum eternally in that safe and narrow orbit in which America likes to see the Negro live: between laughter and tears. 
 Citation Example: Richard Wright, Between Laughter and Tears, New Massas, 25 (October 5, 1937), pp. 22, 25.

• Give two recent critical opinions about your novel (opinions within the 1990-2000). 
 Example: Darwin Turner believes that Hurston improved her characterization by caricaturing less frequently and by delineating minor characters more carefully. Turner, however, believe that despite Hurston s general improvements, she continued to exhibit defects evidencing her inability to complete her transformation from a short story writer into a novelist. Moreover, his tendency to view Hurston as a shallow, quick-tempered woman, desperate for recognition colors his judgments about her novel. 
 Citation Example: Darwin Turner, In a Minor Chord (Carbondale): Southern Illinois Press, 1971 pp. 89- 120.

• Write one paragraph giving your assessment of the criticism that has been done on your novel. 
 Example: Most of the critics who have reviewed Hurston s Their Eyes Were Watching God have been men who have given chauvinistic and paternalistic readings of the novel. The biased assessments of the male critics have done nothing to inspire an understanding of Hurston s purpose for writing the novel. Neither have these reviews exhibited an understanding about the conditions under which the novelist worked and the conditions by which her intentions have been molded. Only Robert Hemenway s recent study, Zora Neale Hurston: A Literary Biography shows inspirations for Hurston s novel and for Hurston, a woman too often besmirched by malicious gossip and seldom appreciated as a warm-hearted, believable soul, cut down to fighting size by circumstances.

• Pretend in one paragraph that you are a feminist critic and give your interpretation of your novel.