DEREK WALCOTT was born in St. Lucia, British West Indies, in 1930. He lived there till he went to the University of the West Indies, the Jamaica campus, in 1950. After graduating, he went to Trinidad, wh ere he worked with the Trinidad Theater Wor kshop, writing plays anddirecting them. In the past few years he has spent more, if not most,of his time in the United States writing and teaching.

He has had at least two lives. One of them, acknowledging his white English grandfather, has kept in touch with the Empire, the classics, English literature, but also the insignia of Greece and Rome. The other has stayed in the streets of Port of Spain, speaking the patois, Creole. It would be wrong to say that his first life has issued in poems, his second in plays, but the error is venial, because the plays are Walcott's effort to give his people what they have lacked or forgotten, a sense of themselves in historical and dramatic terms. His poems have been more intimate meditations, crossing into public issues only by necessity and rarely for long.

Walcott has published more than twenty plays. The majority of these plays have been produced by the Trinidad Theatre Workshop, and have also been widely staged elsewhere. Many of them deal, either directly or indirectly, with the liminal status of the West Indies in the postcolonial period. Epistemological, ontological, economical, political, and social themes make regular appearances in Walcott's plays.

In his 1970 essay on art (and specifically theatre) in his native region, What the Twilight Says: An Overture, Walcott bemoans the lasting effects of over 400 years of colonial rule. He reflects on the West Indies as colonized space, and the problems presented by a region with little in the way of truly indigenous forms, and with little national or nationalist identity. Walcott shifts his poetic language between formal English and patois to highlight the linguistic dexterity of the Caribbean people. While recognising the profound psychological and material wrongs of the colonial project, Walcott simultaneously celebrates the hybridisation of Antillean cultures. His epic poem Omeros exposes the complex cultural strains that converge in his native St. Lucia, celebrating at once the European, Amerindian, and African heritage shared by the islanders.

Discussions of epistemological effects of colonization inform plays such as Ti-Jean and his Brothers and Patomime. One of the eponymous brothers in Ti-Jean and his Brothers (Mi-Jean) is shown to have much information, but to truly know nothing. Every line Mi-Jean recites is rote knowledge gained from the coloniser, and as such is unable to be synthesized and thus is inapplicable to his existence as colonised person.

Walcott probes the colonial dialectic in his two-hander Pantomime. In the play, Walcott revisions the story of Robinson Crusoe / Man Friday in an effort to destabilize the colonial power constructs. Reversing the roles of master / servant, Walcott temporarily lends to Trinidadian Jackson, a guest house factotum and calypso singer, the role of Crusoe, with Harry, a British ex-patriate and owner, the identity of “Thursday,” thus resetting Daniel Defoe's legend in pre-colonial days. Recalling his fascination with the Edenic concept on naming, Walcott highlights the problem that faces the Caribbean writer by having Jackson re-appropriate the material objects around him, re-christening them in a pseudo-African language, calling the table “patamba,” the chair “banda,” etc, recalling the poesía negra's use of jitanjáfora mentioned earlier. The scene at first reflects Jackson’s agency: he has the ability to resurrect the language of his ancestors and regain ownership of the material of his island, teaching his minion Harry, the Anglo Thursday, his new tongue and establishing authority over his surroundings. Jackson's inability to resurrect a dead language reflects the Caribbean's lack of a single, discernable cultural history; Harry's retort reveals the violence inherent in the linguistic indoctrination of the colonial powers: language through the barrel of a gun. Walcott writes in English, the language of Trinidad, but he also makes full use of the local dialects, or what Barbadian writer Edward Kamau Brathwaite calls “nation language,” and portrays Jackson as code-switching throughout the play to reveal his culture’s linguistic dexterity.

Walcott's plays weave together a variety of forms; including those of the folktale, morality play, allegory, fable, ritual and myth; as well as using emblematic and mythological characters to address issues in non-realistic ways.

Chinua Achebe (born November 16, 1930) is a Nigerian novelist, poet, and literary critic. A diplomat in the ill-fated Biafran government of 1967-1970, Achebe is primarily interested in African politics, depictions of Africa and Africans in the West, pre-colonial African culture, and the effects of colonialism on African societies.

Achebe's 1958 novel Things Fall Apart, which explores colonialism and Igbo society, is the most widely-read book in modern African literature, translated into over 50 languages. He generated controversy and praise in 1975 for his classic critical text on Joseph Conrad, and his 2000 essay collection Home and Exile reiterated his long-standing belief that Africa and Africans were being unfairly marginalized by European and Western-oriented intellectuals.

Things Fall Apart

It is a 1959 English-language novel, a staple book in schools throughout Africa and widely read and studied in English-speaking countries around the world. It is seen as the archetypal modern African novel in English, and one of the first African novels written in English to receive global critical acclaim. The title of the novel comes from William Butler Yeats' poem, "The Second Coming."

The novel concerns the life of Okonkwo, a leader and local wrestling champion throughout the nine villages of the Ibo ethnic group of Umuofia in Nigeria, his three wives, his children (mainly concerning his oldest son Nwoye and his favorite daughter Ezinma), and the influences of British colonialism and Christian missionaries on his traditional Igbo (archaically spelled "Ibo") community during an unspecified time in the late 1800s or early 1900s.

Literary history

Things Fall Apart is a milestone in African literature. It has achieved the status of the archetypal modern African novel in English, is read in Nigeria and the rest of Africa where it is a staple in schools; it is read and studied widely in Europe and North America where hundreds of articles and scores of major studies have been written about it; in India and Australia it is probably the most famous African novel.

It annually sells more than a million copies and is considered Achebe's magnum opus.

It was followed by a sequel, No Longer at Ease (1960), originally written as the second part of a larger work together with Things Fall Apart, and Arrow of God (1964), on a similar subject. In addition, Achebe states that his two later novels, A Man of the People (1966) and Anthills of the Savannah (1987), while not featuring Okonkwo's descendants and indeed set in completely fictional African countries, are spiritual successors to the previous novels in chronicling African history.

Lampman wrote more than 300 poems in this last period of his life, although scarcely half of these were published prior to his death. For single poems or groups of poems he found outlets in the literary magazines of the day: in Canada, chiefly the Week; in the United States, Scribner’s Magazine, the Youth’s Companion, the Independent, the Atlantic Monthly, and Harper’s Magazine. In 1888, with the help of a legacy left to his wife, he published Among the millet and other poems. In 1895, after many delays and difficulties with a number of publishers, Copeland and Day of Boston published Lyrics of earth (it actually appeared the following spring). A third volume, Alcyone, and other poems, in press at the time of his death, was held back by Scott

“Placid” is another matter. Lampman’s spirit, from the end of his university days, had become increasingly troubled, beset by what he called a “morbid sensitivity.” Ironically, poetry was both a main source of his suffering and its therapy. Before he had left Toronto for Ottawa, he had written to a friend: “Good or ill – poetry is to some men like the magnetic sea mountain in the Arabian Nights, that drew the very nails out of the ships to their distraction. This same delusion will doubtless ruin me, unfitting me for any solid profession, and yet in the end fulfilling none of the vapoury hopes I have founded upon it.” Lampman was certainly not “ruined” by poetry, yet what he had said in his letter was to become a kind of self-fulfilling prophecy. By the end of the 1880s he was in full command of the type of short nature poem on which his reputation was ultimately to rest. Always, however, he had wanted to do something on a grander scale, poems with “more human life” in them, as he put it, and now, urged on by his friend Thomson, he laboured over a series of long dramatic narratives, some of them drafts from earlier days, based on ancient tales and biblical lore. They did not work; Lampman knew, as his critics were to know later, that there was not a spark of life in them. By 1893 he was thoroughly depressed. “There is one kind of work I can do,” he wrote Thomson, “nature work, as they call it and I had better confine myself to that.” The long delay in finding a publisher for Lyrics of earth increased his sense of failure. Meanwhile, his private life was disturbed by a “personal drama” only recently disclosed in its particulars: for some time he had been having an affair (if that is the word) with a fellow-worker at the Post Office, Katherine Waddell, whom he had met in 1889, and it was becoming clear that they must break the connection. In the face of all these trials one is inclined to say, as Scott said on occasion, “Poor Archie!” Critics were later to draw parallels between Lampman’s afflictions and the afflictions of Keats. But Lampman, though often hard up, was never poor; nor was he ever reviled by the critics. He had friends in reasonably high places, and he was well served by the incomparable loyalty of Scott and Thomson. Although he despised, and lampooned in his letters, the intellectual environment of Ottawa (“I am suffocated. If I had the genius of Milton, I could do nothing.”), it must be remembered that, besides Scott, the environment included John George Bourinot*, Campbell, William Dawson Le Sueur*, Ritchie, and like men of culture and learning, all of them known to the poet. Lampman’s Angst was nevertheless real enough to him. With talents to match his zeal, he is the first Canadian poet (Isabella Valancy Crawford* might have an equal claim) to whom nothing really matters but the world of the poetic imagination, and to the extent that this is so he reflects the problems that arose in the latter part of the 19th century when a hobby became an obsession. The effect on Lampman was to make him push the world, which he had always held at arm’s length, still farther away. His retreat was to nature and the poetry nature engendered. Mercifully, in the year before he died he was tranquil. He was working on one of the finest of his nature poems, “Winter uplands,” in his last days.

Lampman achieved excellence in only a relatively small body of poems, perhaps one-third of his total output. Take these away and the residue, which would have to include the long narratives such as “The story of an affinity” and “David and Abigail,” and many of his aphoristic and quasi-philosophical poems such as “Strife and freedom” and “Good speech,” would scarcely qualify him for serious biographical attention. The literary influences that shaped his consciousness at the outset were those to be expected from the offshoot of a literate and solidly anglophile family of the time: Shelley, Wordsworth, Keats, Coleridge, Tennyson, and Arnold, to a lesser extent Byron, Browning, and Swinburne. Of these, Keats and Arnold were the most important: Keats for the restraint and intensity of his imagery (“Keats has always had such a fascination for me and so permeated my whole mental outfit that I have an idea that he has found a sort of faint reincarnation in me.”), and Arnold for his lofty idealism and moral tone. But in the end it was the core of poems he fashioned in his own way that counted. Like Antaeus, Lampman found his source of strength when his feet touched the ground. He made nature his boon companion; he observed, he felt, he recorded. The effect is that of looking through a small window at a piece of landscape carefully ordered and exact in detail. Claude Thomas Bissell has aptly called it “picturesque realism.” This description, however, is too simple. The observed detail, if we include access through sound as much as sight, is certainly there: when the wind comes, the “glimmering leaves” of the poplar “beat / Together like innumerable small hands”; into “the pale depth of the noon” on a heat-soaked day “A wandering thrush slides leisurely / His thin revolving tune”; the “dry cicada” becomes “that crazy fiddler of the hot mid-year”; as the poet walks in a winter forest “A branch cracks now and then, and its soft load / Drifts by me in a thin prismatic shower”; lying in a field of timothy at harvest time he hears “the crackling rustle of the pitch-forked hay”; on a river, canoeing, he watches seven ducks break from the water and “With a swivelling whistle go.” But these honed and crafted images, and there are many of them, would not be enough; taken by themselves they would constitute only, as Arnold observed of the flashy Spasmodic School of poetry in the mid century, “a shower of glittering images.” In the end it is the extraordinarily organic and unified field of apprehension to which these poems attain that marks them as high art. Characteristically, to paraphrase Whitman, the poet loafs and invites his soul. The mood is dreamlike; and surely the word “dream,” or some derivative of it, is the most pervasive of all key words in the Lampman canon. Then, dreamlike becomes trancelike, and the observer, still fixed in a vantage point and quartering his field, flows by some mystic process into the very essences of the picture observed. The symbiosis is astonishingly complete. Seemingly effortless rhymes, deft metrics, and sure harmonies endorse the unity of the canvas.

A Canadian poet and prose writer. Besides his own body of work, Roberts is known as the "Father of Canadian Poetry" because he served as an inspiration for other writers of his time. Roberts, his cousin Bliss Carman, Archibald Lampman and Duncan Campbell Scott were known as the "Confederation poets".

Together, these four poets became known as the "Confederation" poets.

His two best collections of verse, In Divers Tones and Songs of the Common Day and Ave! An Ode for the Shelley Centenary . In this latter work, Roberts recreated Maritime life with vivid sensitivity.

His most successful prose genre was the animal story, in which he drew upon his early experience in the wilds of the Maritimes. Along with Ernest Thompson Seton, Roberts is credited with inventing the modern animal story. He published over a dozen such stories between Earth's Enigmas and Eyes of the Wilderness.

Roberts’s "tales of animals are symbolic...not with the artificial symbolism of ‘Aesop’s Fables’..., but by revealing in the simple truth of animal life a universal meaning. The symbol is not invented; the thing is found to be symbolic".

Earth’s Enigmas participates in two of the discourses that shaped Canadian almost as much as American writing in the eighteen eighties and nineties:

<!--[if !supportLists]-->(1) <!--[endif]-->the discourse of anti-modernity that valorized pre-and undercivilized spaces as realms of emotional and spiritual intensity anterior or adjacent to the materialistic and artificial world of the modern city;

<!--[if !supportLists]-->(2) <!--[endif]-->and (2) the related discourse of therapeutics that encouraged writers to produce books set in such spaces that would medicine the minds and nervous systems of the victims of modernity.

During the pre-Confederation period, Canada’s popularity as a destination for tourists seeking picturesque and sublime scenery grew as a result of various literary and transportational factors.

“The Tantramar Revisited” is Charles G.D. Roberts’ poetic masterpiece and is divided into five stanzas of irregular length, each containing variations on what has variously been seen as the hexameter or the elegiac metre. In view of the great metrical variation in the poem and of the fact that the elegiac metre itself consists of alternate hexameter and pentameter lines, it seems both prudent and felicitious to say simply that in “The Tantramar Revisited” Roberts first opens with and then plays against a hexameter norm.

When commenting on the verse form of “The Tantramar Revisited” most critics cite the hexameters of Longfellow’s Evangeline as Roberts’ precedent and model, usually ramarking that the poem is derivative and reminiscent without being original or innovative. Longfellow was one of the poets whose work inspired the Canadian writer “in his earliest days with the love of poetry” . He described Longfellow as “the greatest of New England’s poets” and Evangeline as an instance of the way in which the Maritime Provinces and the New England States had “acted and reacted upon one another. . . .”

While Roberts did not invent a new form for his poem, his decision to remember and to echo in “The Tantramar Revisited” the verse form, the cadences, and even specific details of Evangeline is both apt and appropriate, not only because his poem takes as its theme “nostalgic remembrance,” but also because it takes as its subject a portion of the landscape of the Maritimes, and indeed precisely that portion which Cappon appositely calls “the land of Evangeline.” The suggestion, then, is that the verse form of “The Tantramar Revisited” is more than mere “masterly” handling of the form that Longfellow had made his own Evangeline; it is a suitably allusive use of the hexameter by means of which the Canadian poet echoes the American poem and, in so doing, adds historical depth and resonance to his meditation on the effects of time and memory in the region of the Tantramar marshes on the Bay of Fundy. “The Tantramar Revisited” thus gains an historical dimension (and it is worth remembering here Roberts’ well-known fascination with the history of the Maritimes) through an allusion inherent in its verse form and its cadences.

The verse form of “The Tantramar Revisited” is interesting for reasons other than its allusiveness. Remark upon the facility and skill with which Roberts handles his metre. By setting up the expectation of a hexameter rhythm and then playing against it the rhythms dictated by the verbal sense and the reading voice, or, to be more specific, by establishing a hexameter norm at the beginning of the poem (the first line has a full sixteen syllables) and then proceeding to modify it with more natural rhythms, (few lines in the body of the poem have more than thirteen syllables). Roberts serves the reader’s ear notice of what, in effect, is the imaginative adventure of the poem: the speaker’s discovery of the disjunction between his expectation and the reality, between his expectation that the marshlands have not been affected by Time and the reality that, of course, they have. Put somewhat crudely, the suggestion is that, just as the classical metre, which as a classics metre might seem immune to the forces of “change” is, the reader discovers, far from immune to change in “The Tantramar Revisited,” so the speaker of the poem comes to realize that even in the landscape of his youth the same forces are at work.

Canadian short fiction has always maintained close associations with the popular markets provided by newspapers and LITERARY MAGAZINES. A pattern of first publication in periodicals and subsequent collection in book form was established in the 19th century and has continued to the present day.

Portions of Susanna MOODIE'S ROUGHING IT IN THE BUSH were first published in The Literary Garland before appearing in book form in 1852. Stephen LEACOCK published SUNSHINE SKETCHES OF A LITTLE TOWN in The Montreal Daily Star (Feb-June 1912), then as a book later the same year.

Since the 1920s the connections between short fiction and newspapers or magazines have remained strong, as seen in the publication of work by Morley Callaghan, Mavis GALLANT, Alice MUNRO in periodicals. Several writers have also edited newspapers, magazines or anthologies.

Some critics define the sketch as "an apparently personal anecdote or memoir which focuses on one particular place, person, or experience, and is usually intended for magazine publication." Its colloquial tone and informal structure relate it to the epistolary form employed in several early Canadian works.

One common kind is the humorous or satirical sketch, as found in the works of Leacock.

A second kind is the autobiographical, descriptive or travel sketch, as practised by Archibald LAMPMAN and Duncan Campbell SCOTT.

The most distinctive early contribution by Canadians to short fiction was the animal stories of Roberts.

Scott's work looks back to 19th-century American gothic and romantic and local-colour writing, yet its ironic tone connects it with mid-20th-century writing, and his use of imagery anticipates the poetically conceived short stories written later in the century.

Morley Callaghan was "the first and most important of the modern short-story writers in Canada". Callaghan's stories were important for his choices of subject and situation; his modern, urban, even international outlook; his understanding of the importance and the difficulty of writing about everyday life; and the intimately human moral complexities that he explored. Furthermore, the stories created a strong feeling of immediacy because of his special and new way of using words plainly. Perhaps even more important to the succeeding generation of writers was the reputation that Callaghan had made for himself.

His short stories significantly influenced Canadian writers from the late 1940s to the early 1960s, including Margaret LAURENCE and Alice Munro, both major contributors to the history of short fiction in Canada. By the 1980s, Munro had the best popular and international reputation of Canadian short story writers. She emerged as the writer most often identified with the rebirth of the Canadian short story, and as the writer most prominently concerned with trying to shape short stories into coherent books or story cycles.

The most truly international of Canadian short-story writers, however, is Mavis Gallant. Her Stories of Paris (1985) brought a more intricate internationalism, a richly textured political awareness and exquisite craft to Canadian short fiction.

Where twenty years ago Canadian stories stressed content - what a story was about - the main emphasis now is on the story as verbal and rhetorical performance. " These differences can be perceived in the evolution of some writers' conceptions of the short story. Munro's stories, for example, move from her early narrative style towards a freer, more open, more dreamlike form evident in such collections as The Progress of Love.

Canadian writers of short fiction, like authors in other genres, are subject to fluctuations in popularity. As personal likes shift back and forth between plain style and verbal play or between realism and fantasy, individual writers' reputations rise and fall accordingly - regardless of their work's quality. Furthermore, attention is rarely given to a writer's literary development, to a writer's changing views of the form of the short story.

During the 20th century, predominant patterns of habitation in Canada shifted from rural to urban settings.

In Canadian literature, a corresponding shift can be seen in fictional settings; and transitions from pastoral to urban settings have been associated with new themes and archetypes, as well as a revised approach to realism. However, given that this country’s perceived literary identity itself has been shaped by a deep and abiding contact with nature, it is interesting to question the extent to which a shift to urban settings automatically marks ‘new ground’ in Canadian fiction.

Narratives “portray man in conflict with a forbidding land and a forbidding climate, in conflict with his own inchoate impulses…and in conflict always with time which quickly eats away that which he builds.

With the creation of a Canadian nation in 1867 a self-consciousness arose, a desire to define the "Canadian", to create a "national" literature. Handily enough, this coincided with a period of European thought in which the virtues of the "northern" were being heavily promoted: the superiority of the strong, manly, active "northern" peoples — the "Anglo-Saxons" and "Scandinavians" — over the weak, feminine, passive "southern" peoples; the heroic qualities of the old Icelandic texts and the Ring cycle. So the intellectual mood was receptive to precisely those qualities which Canada could naturally boast. There was increased emphasis on the "northern" roots of the Canadians; in a spirit of generous tolerance. In literature, the obvious subject was, of course, the land. Much of what was written then — subsequently referred to disparagingly as "the maple-leaf school" — is, as might be expected, very bad, but in the best work one sees the beginnings not only of a kind of modus vivendi with the land, but of an appreciation of it on its own terms: powerfully accurate descriptions in the poetry of the "Confederation poets", gradually a new kind of realism shorn of romantic diction and attitudes, a reversal of values that sees the beauty of the clear, cold winters, the spare ruggedness of the wilderness, and finally the admission that this is not a land to be tamed, an acceptance of the land on its own terms, without any imposition of human purpose or even human relevance. This is a slow development, but the end state is perhaps best caught in a passage in Hugh Mac- Lennan's The Watch That Ends the Night. The subsuming of the human in the animal world that Purdy suggests so subtly here is highly appropriate, for one of the key stages in this development of the relationship of Canadian literature to the land was marked by the invention around the turn of the century by Ernest Thompson Seton and Sir Charles G.D.Roberts of the modern animal story, in which for the first time animal tales are based on observation and dispense with sentimentality and didacticism; the attempt to see animals naturally in their environment is then paralleled by, and strengthens, the effort to achieve the same for humans.

But actually experiencing the North, getting out into the wilderness, has been through the the technological tool that made possible the extension of European control, the means by which this new space was most intensely experienced. So the frequency with which journeys by canoe appear in Canadian literature comes as no surprise. The canoe's literal function is that it enables one to move about in an otherwise impenetrable country, but symbolically it allows one to meet dangers and overcome challenges, to experience the land in the most intimate possible way, to identify with the native inhabitants, to achieve varying degrees and kinds of freedom. Interestingly enough, the earliest use of this motif to suggest some of these qualities seems to be found in the work of Susanna Moodie's contentment at being able to paddle off in a canoe and simply achieve solitude for a while. Certainly part of their delight stems from the ability that moving about in a canoe gave them to escape their usual gender roles, something that would not have applied to men. But as the century wore on, the canoe motif is increasingly found in works by men as well, in the form of poems and prose in which the writers go out to deliberately encounter and experience the wilderness (Lampman's "Temagami" is a good example of this).

Increasingly in the twentieth century these journeys are seen as retreats, or at least temporary withdrawals from civilization, spiritual journeys, journeys into a symbolic space: for Duncan Campbell Scott the journey to "The Height of Land" brings a mystic sense of the harmony of the contradictory forces of life. this corresponds to the general trend towards employing the wilderness for symbolic purposes.

An essentially sympathetic picture of the Natives was created around the turn of the century by Duncan Campbell Scott, with his poetry and tales of Indians' endurance and their dignity in the face of great adversity, and the insensitivity of Whites.

Zora Neale Hurston was born in Eatonville, Florida, a small town inhabited primarily by African-Americans. Her mother died shortly after her birth leaving Hurston in the care of her father, who quickly married a woman who sent little Hurston to school in Jacksonville, providing her with her first glance at racial segregation. Hurston left school due to financial difficulties and family problems which led her to stay with her mother's friends. At age fourteen, she worked as a maid to earn money for her education but failed miserably. Hurston's first successful employment was with the Gilbert and Sullivan repertory company, which offered Hurston travel and reading time. When that job was exhausted, she worked as a waitress to get through school in Baltimore. She later attended Morgan Academy supported by employment with a clergyman. In the fall of 1918-1920 Hurston attended Howard University where she met and fell in love with Herbert Sheen, who she eventually married--a marriage that lasted only four years.

Hurston's literary work captured the attention of Charles Spurgeon Johnson, founder of Opportunity Magazine. Based on the merit of her work, he invited Hurston to come to New York, which was her introduction to the Harlem Renaissance and which provided her with inspiration and opportunity in the literary world of African-Americans. Hurston's "Sweat" and "The Gilded Six Bits" were influenced by Hurston's life within the Harlem Renaissance.

Hurston's "Sweat," written in 1926, portrays two primary influences in her life. The first influence was Hurston's childhood town of Eatonville and its economic situation. Hurston's town was ideal for a young African-American girl in the early nineteenth century, providing a safe haven from restrictions of race. The town also preserved its African-American culture and history due to its seclusion from Winter Park. "Sweat" reveals much of Hurston's nostalgic memories, though it primarily focuses on Eatonville's economic dependence on the neighboring town of Winter Park. When Hurston was growing up many of Winter Park's inhabitants were white snow birds with money. Like Delia in "Sweat," African-American residents of Eatonville made daily pilgrimages across the rail road tracks to clean houses, tend gardens, cook meals and watch the children of Winter Park. Hurston took advantage of this situation by working as a maid, though she failed by refusing to behave humbly and fought off sexual advances by her employers.

"Sweat" is influenced not only by Hurston's childhood town but also by her relationship with her employer, Fannie Hurst. Hurston met the writer Hurst at Opportunity's award dinner, May 1, 1925, one year prior to the writing of "Sweat." Hurst hired Hurston as a live-in secretary. Hurston felt dependent on Fannie Hurst's white patronage for recognition, much like Delia did in "Sweat," and saw her patron as a restriction to her art.

The "Gilded Six Bits," written in 1933, was influenced by Hurston's anthropological studies and her rocky relationships in marriage. Hurston first began her anthropological studies after she graduated with a B.A. Degree in 1928, from Barnard College. Hurston had been advised to take anthropology classes to broaden her education. Dr. Franz Boas, a professor of anthropology at Barnard, took Hurston under his wing and "made an anthropologist out of her," giving here analytical tools for returning south to gather black folklore. For this journey, which began in late Febuary 1927, Hurston was awarded a fellowship to study and collect southern folklore, a unique opportunity to compare her new home of New York city to her old home of Eatonville . "The Gilded Six Bits" focuses on this comparison, demonstrating that the promises of a city are often gilded and that life in quaint rural folk ways is life with value and strength.

Hurston's difficulty in marriages was another contribution to Hurston's story. Hurston was married and divorced twice. Her first marriage, on May 19, 1927, was to Herbert Sheen, a jazz pianist, singer, and medical student; the two divorced shortly after on July 7, 1931. Hurston's rocky marriage occurred just prior to the writing of "The Gilded Six-Bits" which portrays a marriage replete with infidelity and hatred. In "The Gilded Six-Bits," Missie's infidelity tests the strength of the marriage with Joe, a marriage which ultimately weathers the storm. Perhaps the marriage in "The Gilded Six-Bits" is spared because, despite Hurston's hardships in her own marriages, she saw marriage as an important institution capable of providing possibilities in life.

Hurston's stories "Sweat" and "The Gilded Six-Bits" are influenced by her life as an African-American woman in the Harlem Renaissance. The greatest influence in Hurston's life for "Sweat" was the economical situation in her small childhood town of Eatonville and her relationship with her patron, Fannie Hurst. "The Gilded Six-Bits" was influenced by her educational endeavors in anthropology and her unsuccessful marriage with Herbert Sheen.

In New York in 1905, after a successful real estate market had declined, landlords and developers attempted to entice African-American realtors and tenants. After and during World War I, thousands of blacks migrated from the South and other areas to look for jobs and, by 1923, the number of blacks in New York was estimated to be 183,428, nearly three times that reported in 1910. Two thirds of these people settled in Harlem which, at that time, was distinctively black (Lewis, "Harlem's First Shining" 57). In 1917, an intellectual movement, known as the Harlem Renaissance, began in Harlem and lasted until 1935.

W.E.B. Du Bois described the leaders of the movement as the Talented Tenth, a few privileged professionals who were nearly all second generation college graduates. These intellectuals "perceived that, although the roads to the ballot box, the union hall . . . and the office were blocked" off, there were two paths that were not barred: arts and letters (Lewis, "Harlem's First Shining"). The Talented Tenth created a new ideology of racial assertiveness that was to be embraced by influential African-Americans, which included educated doctors, lawyers and businessmen. These people, as Du Bois theorized, would comprise ten percent of the total African-American population in 1920. However, statistics show that there were by no means as many educated African-American leaders in 1920 as Du Bois had hoped.

In the fall of 1917, the rediscovered African-American was publicly announced with Emily Hapgood's production of three one-act plays: The Rider of Dreams, Simon the Cyrenian, and Granny Maumee, all written by her husband, Ridgely Torrence. This production, presented at the Old Garden Street Theater near Broadway, was a significant event because the cast was all-black and the parts were dignified. The plays and the actors were both given high reviews, which helped propel African-Americans into the spotlight (Lewis, Introduction xx). Thus, African-Americans were beginning to assert themselves and to be recognized in the literary and artistic realms, which white Americans dominated at the time. Two years later, the Hapgood production was preceeded by the presentation of O'Neill's Emperor Jones and several other plays which featured black actors. The Harlem Renaissance, which would develop a new African-American consciousness, had officially begun and would continue until 1935.

Acccording to David Levering Lewis, the literary movement was broken up into three phases: the Bohemian Renaissance, the era of the Talented Tenth, and the Negro Renaissance (Introducation xvii). Each phase had distinctly different influences and produced different writings.

Phase one, the Bohemian Renaissance, spanning from 1917-1923, was dominated by white authors writing about black people. These authors, the Bohemians and Revolutionaries, were fascinated with the life of black people. Eugene O'Neill's Emperor Jones was an example of a play, written by a white author, which featured a black man as a main character who was, in turn, played by a black actor, Charles Gilpin. Ironically, the play was not accepted by the Harlem community. However, the play was a huge success outside Harlem for many decades. In fact, Gilpin's superb acting and O'Neill's theatrical affects (gathered from "superficial contacts with black life") combined to produce a play that helped shaped the course of American Drama of the time.

The second phase, from 1924-1926, was presided over by the Civil Rights establishments of the National Urban League (NUL) and the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP). It was a "period of interracial collaboration between Zora Neal Hurston's 'Negrotarian' whites and the African American Talented Tenth".

The dominant ideology of the third phase was the advancement of African-American civil rights through the creation of an artistic and literary movement. According to W.E.B. Du Bois, white people, who suggested that blacks quit complaining about not having recognition and start showing what they could do, helped create the second period of the Harlem Renaissance. Black writers, afraid to fight and allured by money and publicity, agreed and decided to show what they deserved and let the reward come to them.

And it is right here that the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People comes upon the field, comes with its great call to a new battle, a new fight and new things to fight before the old things are wholly won; and to say that the beauty of truth and freedom which shall some day be our heritage and the heritage of all civilized men is not in our hands yet and that we ourselves must not fail to realize.

The NUL and NAACP, which propaganda had influenced, were the driving force in this phase of the Harlem Renaissance and dictated what should be written.

The third and final phase, beginning before the second phase was complete, was called the Negro Renaissance. African-Americans themselves dominated the third phase of the Harlem Renaissance, which began in 1926 and ended with the Harlem riot of 1935 and was the longest-running of the three phases. It was marked by a rebellion of writers and artists against many of the Civil Rights establishments. "Among some of the poets and writers there was simmering ingratitude and, finally, even open revolt against the high-toned artistic standards of the NAACP's and Urban League's distinguished directors". Writers such as Zora Neale Hurston, Langston Hughes and Wallace Thurmon openly expressed their feelings and their identities without fear or shame. No longer looking for approval from whites, they only considered whether their works pleased African-Americans. The black writers were reacting against the stereotypes of African-Americans and were attempting to maintain an art that was unique while also maintaining their self- and racial-identities.

As short as the literary period of the Harlem Renaissance was, a legacy was left that African-Americans today can be proud of. Although the uneducated workingman of Harlem knew little about the success of the black writers, studies estimate that, between 1919 and 1930, more black writers were published than in any other decade in American history prior to the 1960s. The Harlem Renaissance created a new consciousness in both white and black Americans, and its importance lies more in the legacy it left behind of a new type of black fiction than in the actual socio-economic changes it incurred.