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Overview
One of Zora Neale Hurston’s earliest publications, “Spunk” established her as a key writer of the Harlem Renaissance from the beginning of her writing career
. A comic ghost story set in the same fictionalized version of her hometown as her novel Their Eyes Were Watching God, the story was first published in Opportunity: A Journal of Negro Life as a prize-winner in their 1925 literary contest and was subsequently included in Alain Locke’s anthology The New Negro: An Interpretation, considered the defining collection of the Harlem Renaissance. Hurston developed the story into a play in 1935.Read a full plot summary, an analysis of Spunk Banks, and descriptions of the main ideas in "Spunk."
