Recommendations
Books Like Mules and Men by Zora Neale Hurston
For readers of the African American folklore collection
If you loved Mules and Men — the folk tales from Eatonville, the Hoodoo practices in New Orleans, and Hurston's revolutionary presentation of African American folk culture from the inside — these books share the same celebration of African American vernacular culture, the same engagement with the oral tradition, and the same understanding that folk wisdom is not primitive but sophisticated.
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Buy on AmazonTheir Eyes Were Watching God
by Zora Neale Hurston
The essential companion — Hurston's masterpiece; the fiction that emerges from the folklore; the best way to see what the folk material of Mules and Men looks like when it is transformed into a sustained narrative.
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Buy on AmazonJonah's Gourd Vine
by Zora Neale Hurston
Hurston's debut novel — the companion fiction from Eatonville; the sermons of John Pearson draw directly from the African American oral tradition documented in Mules and Men.
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Buy on AmazonTell My Horse
by Zora Neale Hurston
Hurston's companion folklore collection — about Vodou practices in Jamaica and Haiti; the complement to Mules and Men in her larger project of collecting African diasporic spiritual and cultural traditions.
- 4Buy on Amazon
The Souls of Black Folk
by W.E.B. Du Bois
Du Bois's landmark work — the companion and opposing perspective in African American intellectual history; Du Bois argues that Black Americans have a 'double consciousness' that separates them from their folk roots; Hurston's Mules and Men is the contrary argument that the folk roots are a source of strength, not division.
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Buy on AmazonBlack Elk Speaks
by John G. Neihardt
Neihardt's account of the Oglala Sioux holy man — the companion in American literature about a traditional oral and spiritual culture documented by an outsider-turned-insider; both books face the question of how to render living spiritual traditions in written English.
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Buy on AmazonUncle Remus: His Songs and Sayings
by Joel Chandler Harris
Harris's influential collection of African American folk tales — the important predecessor and the contrast case; where Harris collected the tales through the mediation of a white narrator who frames them condescendingly, Hurston collects them from inside the community; the comparison shows what Hurston's approach achieved.
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Buy on AmazonDust Tracks on a Road
by Zora Neale Hurston
Hurston's autobiography — the companion memoir that contextualizes the fieldwork of Mules and Men within her life; the biography behind the anthropology.
- 8Buy on Amazon
Kindred
by Octavia Butler
Butler's time-travel novel — the companion in African American literature that draws on and transforms the folk tradition; where Hurston collects the folk tradition, Butler uses it as the imaginative foundation for a contemporary narrative about slavery's persistence.
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