Tell My Horse
Philadelphia: J.B. Lippincott Company, 1938.
First edition, first printing. 301 pp. Bound in publisher's red and blue striped cloth lettered in white on spine, red topstain, pictorial endpapers; lacking the dust jacket. Near Fine with light wear to cloth, small scattered stains to topstain, bump to lower textblock edge slightly affecting pp. 180-280. Contemporary bookplate to front pastedown, faint offsetting from frontispiece to title page, pencil inscription to back pastedown.
A collection of Caribbean folklore from the Harlem Renaissance luminary. In 1936 Zora Neale Hurston was awarded a travel grant of $2,000 to study African culture in the West Indies. She spent months gathering tales and observing magic practices in Jamaica and Haiti, and it was in Haiti that she wrote Their Eyes Were Watching God in just seven weeks. It took her longer to edit Tell My Horse, and she found some voodoo rituals too unnerving to include.
Price: $2,200