Austin Chapter
Reader's Guide

March 2001

Dust Tracks on a Road
by Zora Neal Hurston

1. The "New Yorker" characterized this autobiography as "warm, witty, imaginative and down-to-earth by turns. Do you agree with this assessment?

2. Cite a few examples where the "black experience" differed greatly from the white culture, as shown in the book.

3. Hurston's writings were not accepted by the more political of Afro-American writers of the Harlem Renaissance, such as Richard Wright and Langston Hughes. Why do you think that was?

4. In "Dust Tracks..." Hurston shifts back and forth between her "literate" narrator's voice, and an idiomatic black voice in passages of free indirect discourse.^* Do you think this detracts or adds to the readability of this account?

5. In the chapter "Seeing the World as It Is," the author gives her opinions (highly controversial later), on Race Pride and Race Consciousness. What do you think about her theories as a blueprint for today's race relations?

^*according to critic Henry Gates