I APPROACH the task of discussing Zora Neale Hurston here with considerable humility. Since Zora Neale Hurston: A Literary Biography was published, I have been five years a department head, three years a dean, and am now a chancellor. There are many days when my contribution to the March of Knowledge comes not from scholarship, but from an ingenious scheme for financing the asbestos abatement.

The distinguished company here is intimidating, because it is fair to say that all other writers in this volume are younger than I am, and all have been trained as critical theorists in a way that my generation of scholars was not.

I came to professional literary consciousness in the last wave – really the last gasp – of New Criticism. The Olympian canon was an object of worship, and African-American texts were, by definition, considered inferior objects of study, a category of primitive artifact, exotically interesting, but of a different order from the sacred canon of the high church of American literature.

The training of that particular generation – my generation – has now been superseded, left behind in the dust after the explosion of theory that has reinvigorated our profession. It has been a very liberating experience for me and for the texts I interpret, like Their Eyes Were Watching God.