[Letter from Zora Neale Hurston to Miss Dockstader]

This letter, from author Zora Neale Hurston to Miss Dorothy Dockstader, the book advertising manager at the Chicago Daily News, was found inside Vanderbilt’s first edition copy of Jonah’s Gourd Vine, Hurston’s first novel. Hurston did travel to Chicago in the fall of 1934, as she promised in her letter, and she stopped to visit Charles S. Johnson at Nashville’s Fisk University along the way. After reaching her destination, she wrote Johnson that she “drove the stretch from Nashville to Chicago in one day” (Hurston to Johnson, October 8, 1934).