Zora Neale Hurston's 1942 autobiography, Dust Tracks on a Road, has received some of the most negative criticism of any of Hurston's books. Among critics' complaints – some from Hurston's warmest admirers – is the work's fragmentary nature, a nature which, while present in other Hurston texts, including the universally acclaimed novel Their Eyes Were Watching God, is particularly conspicuous in Dust Tracks. The complaints about Dust Tracks are valid if one insists on the cardinal conventions of autobiography: traditional autobiographical structure and formal organization, and a focused projection of the autobiographical persona. But Dust Tracks portrays a persona that resists reduction to a coherent unity – a person of many moods who is in tension with the world in which she moves. In order to correspond better to this persona, Dust Tracks focuses on the fragmented life of Hurston's imagination: the psychological dynamics of her family, community stories, and characters of friends.