Zora Neale Hurston wrote “The Gilded Six-Bits” 17 years prior to the publication her essay “What White Publisher's Won't Print,” and is a direct response to the lack of literature focused on the “internal lives and emotions of the Negroes” discussed in her later essay. Hurston said that stories of the “'exceptional'” and of the “'quaint'” Negro had “been exploited all out of context already,” however, “realistic” stories centered on the “average, struggling, non-morbid Negro” were almost nonexistent. Hurston's work attempted to fill that gap by focusing on the realities of daily life for Negroes in America during her lifetime and to disprove the assumption “that all non-Anglo-Saxons are uncomplicated stereotypes.” She believed that it is “urgent”
