A Study Guide for Zora Neale Hurston 's "Poker!"

By Gale and Cengage

A Study Guide for Zora Neale Hurston 's "Poker!," excerpted from Gale's acclaimed Drama For Students. This concise study guide includes plot summary; character analysis; author biography; study questions; historical context; suggestions for further reading; and much more. For any literature project, trust Drama For Students for all of your research needs.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Cengage Learning - Gale
• Release date: Aug 12, 2016
• ISBN: 9781535831024

Book preview

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Poker!

Zora Neale Hurston

1931

Introduction

Zora Neale Hurston was a leading figure of the Harlem Renaissance but fell into obscurity after her career was clouded by scandal and changing tastes. Her work as a writer and a folklorist has come back into vogue since the 1990s, and she is recognized as a great American writer. Poker!, a political allegory set among the criminal gangs of Harlem, was performed for only a week in 1931 before it fell victim to the economic troubles of the Great Depression. When Hurston's life ended in poverty, the play's single surviving manuscript was almost burned as waste, but it was rescued and restored to the world by the efforts of the Library of Congress where the play was read in 2005. Its first publication soon followed in 2008. Poker! draws on a rich tradition of black folklore and verbal artistry, while at the same time reflecting the underside of the Harlem Renaissance.

Author Biography

Hurston was born on January 7, 1891, in the small town of Notasulga in Alabama. At that time, African Americans faced official and even legal discrimination. Schools and neighborhoods were segregated, and blacks, especially in the South, were generally denied the right to vote. Because of limited economic opportunities, the black community was far poorer than America as a whole. Nevertheless, Hurston was born into relatively favorable circumstances. Her father, John, was a Baptist minister and moved his family to the town of Eatonville, Florida, which had a mostly black population. There he took over a larger congregation and eventually became the mayor of the town.

Hurston's mother died in 1904, and her father remarried. Her new stepmother had her sent off to a boarding school and then cut her off entirely from any family support. Hurston worked for several years as a maid for a white opera singer and then won a scholarship to Morgan Academy (an exclusively black preparatory school in Baltimore). In order to qualify, Hurston had to claim she had been born in 1901, which led to confusion about her biography until recently. She then attended Howard University where she published her first short story, John Redding Goes to Sea, in 1921 and earned an associate's degree. In 1924, she won a prize for her short story Drenched in Light from the national black magazine