“Spunk” is a realist short story. Realist literature—unlike romantic literature—is characterized by realistic portrayals of everyday life. In “Spunk,” Hurston uses personal knowledge of what it was like to live in an all-Black community in rural Florida to realistically depict such a community. For example, she intentionally uses dialect in dialogue between the characters, capturing what Black people in rural Florida really sounded like when they spoke. She also has the men in the story work in the lumber industry, an industry that was active in Florida in the early 1900s.
This story also belongs to the category of Harlem Renaissance literature. The Harlem Renaissance was a movement that took place in New York City in the 1920s celebrating African-American culture and art. Hurston’s relationship to the other writers involved in the movement was somewhat fraught—while many writers tried to intentionally depict the cultural sophistication of the Black community, Hurston sought to capture her (rural Southern) Black community as they actually were, including patriarchal power structures and conflicts within the community.
To Hurston, her lower-class, occasionally crass characters were sophisticated and she didn’t need to change or edit the types of people she’d actually known while growing up in Florida. For example, while the character Elijah is a sometimes-malicious gossip, he is also a very gifted and engaging storyteller. Hurston’s commitment to depicting rural Black characters without censorship led some Harlem Renaissance writers to accuse her of reinforcing stereotypes, but she remained a part of the movement nonetheless.
