[...] It is not the Black Female Literary Tradition that makes Hurston great. It is Hurston herself. Zora Neale Hurston--capable of expressing human vulnerability as well as its strength, lyrical without sentiment, romantic and yet rigorous and one of the few truly eloquent writers of sex--is as exceptional among black women writers as Tolstoy is among white male writers.

[...] one wants to make a neutral and solid case for her greatnes, to say something more substantial than "She is my sister and I love her." As a reader, I want to claim fellowship with "good writing" without limits; to be able to say that Hurston is my sister and Baldwin is my brother, and so is Kafka my brother, and Nabokov, and Woolf my sister, and Eliot and Ozick. Like all readers, I want my limits to be drawn by my sensibilities, not by my melanin count. [...]