The Literary Legacy of New York's Zora Neale Hurston

The annual Brooklyn Book Festival kicked off this week. It's one of the city's largest literary events and showcases hundreds of modern-day authors — but it also celebrates the literary legacy of trailblazing writers, like New York's own Zora Neale Hurston.

Hurston documented and portrayed the lives of black Americans in the early 20th century. Her most recent book, released posthumously this year, is called "Barracoon: The Story of the Last Black Cargo," and it tells the life story of Cudjo Lewis, one of the last survivors of the Transatlantic slave trade. He was abducted from West Africa nearly 50 years after the slave trade was outlawed in the United States.

Literary critic Deborah Plant, who wrote an introduction to the book, says Hurston’s work had a profound impact on black American literature.

"In works like Mules and Men and Their Eyes Were Watching God, Hurston gave us a sense of ourselves as African Americans, as people who were whole and undiminished," Plant told WNYC's Jami Floyd. "Hurston was one of the first authors to actually do that for us."