Zora Neale Hurston is today recognized as a major contributor to the Harlem Renaissance literature of the 1920s and American modernist literature. Hurston’s most important works, published in the 1930s, emerge from her interest in African American oral and vernacular culture, represented in her most studied publications Mules and Men (1935) and Their Eyes Were Watching God (1937). Hurston’s interest in preserving the culture of the black South remains among her most valuable contributions.