First published in the fall of 1926 in the Messenger magazine, "The Eatonville Anthology" is one of Zora Neale Hurston's most important and interesting short stories because of its design, content, and use of authentic dialect. Hurston's collection of vignettes in "The Eatonville Anthology" do not conform to the narrative pattern that most readers expect from a work of short fiction Hurston's story is a collection of short profiles and anecdotes about a cast of characters who inhabit a small African-American community in central Florida during the early decades of the twentieth century. Together these individual voices are a powerful portrayal of black culture at a time when blacks were largely subsumed by the dominant white culture.
When "The Eatonville Anthology" was published, its design would have been familiar to readers of Edgar Lee Masters' Spoon River Anthology (1915), which was the first of its kind in American literature. Masters' Anthology is a collection of poetic monologues, or epigrams, by former inhabitants of an area in central Illinois. Hurston makes a direct literary allusion to Masters' work with her use of the word "anthology" in the title of her narrative and by composing the chapters of brief, dialect-filled stories about residents of a small Florida town that exists on the outskirts of Orlando. Hurston's "Anthology" is recognized as an important early twentieth-century work for its blend of authentic folklore and fiction.