"Sweat" by Zora Neale Hurston is set, like many of Hurston's works, in a small town in central Florida. Hurston herself was brought up in Eatonville, Florida, and later returned to Florida as an anthropologist, studying, among other things, race and gender relationships.
Hurston's use of dialect in this story, and in what is now considered her most important novel, Their Eyes Were Watching God, has always been controversial. Many writers of the Harlem..