Letters, Women's Biography, Women's Biography

Zora Neale Hurston

Name: Zora Neale Hurston
Author: Carla Kaplan
ISBN: 9780385490351

by Carla Kaplan

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Overview

"Alice Walker's 1975 Ms. magazine article "Looking for Zora" and Robert Hemenway's 1977 biography reintroduced Zora Neale Hurston to the American landscape and ushered in a renaissance for a writer who was a bestselling author at her peak in the 1930s, but died penniless and in obscurity some three decades later." Now, in Zora Neale Hurston: A Life in Letters, the fascinating life of one of the most enigmatic literary figures of the twentieth century comes alive. Through letters to Harlem Renaissance friends Langston Hughes, Alain Locke, Dorothy West, and Carl Van Vechten, and to bestselling authors Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings and Fannie Hurst, among others, readers experience the exuberance and trials of Hurston's life. Her letters to her patron, Mrs. Charlotte "Godmother" Osgood Mason, are laced with equal amounts of cynicism and reverence, and offer a fascinating glimpse of the perilously thin line Hurston tread to maintain vital monetary support as she pursued her art and avant-garde lifestyle (which included crossing the country collecting folklore, and a job as story editor at Paramount Pictures in the 1940s).

About the Author, Carla Kaplan

Carla Kaplan is Professor of English, Gender Studies, and American & Ethnic Studies at the University of Southern California, and a noted Hurston scholar. She is the author of The Erotics of Talk: Women’s Writing and Feminist Paradigms, and the editor of Dark Symphony and Other Works, by Elizabeth Laura Adams, Every Tongue Got to Confess: Negro Folk-Tales from the Gulf States, by Zora Neale Hurston, and Nella Larsen’s Passing.

Biography

During the 1920s, African-American culture in the United States received an exhilarating shot in the arm in the era known as the Harlem Renaissance. For the first time, black American art, music, and literature was being taken seriously among the intelligentsia as a significant force in contemporary culture. At the front of that movement were several writers, including Zora Neale Hurston.

Hurston's work reflected the liberation and experimentation of post-war America. She published stories and co-founded the groundbreaking journal Fire! with poet Langston Hughes and novelist Wallace Thurman. By the ‘30s, Hurston was a bestselling writer, but with the Renaissance on the wane and a new era of politics, economic depression, and the "social realism" movement, Hurston's once glorious literary career was running into dire straits. She would end her life destitute, practically forgotten, buried in an unmarked grave in Florida. However, a resurgence of interest in her work during the 1970s and the tireless work of writer Alice Walker would help reestablish Hurston in her rightful place as one of America's greatest and most influential writers.

Born in Eatonville, Florida, in 1891 to a father who was a Baptist preacher, Hurston was well-versed from birth in the dynamics of the Southern black experience. She brought that keen vision to her writing and published her first story in the Howard University literary magazine while attending the school in 1921. Still, it was not until Hurston moved to New York City in 1925 that she really began to make waves on the literary scene. Her writing was characterized by its unflagging honesty and strength, qualities that Hurston herself exuded. She often ruffled feathers by refusing to adhere to the constricting gender conventions prevalent at the time. This strength and self-confidence was already apparent in the writer's very first works. Her debut novel Jonah's Gourde Vine was praised by The New York Times as "the most vital and original novel about the American Negro that has yet been written by a member of the Negro race." Her second was a bona fide classic, Mules and Men, a compendium of African American folk tales, songs, and maxims that drew on Hurston's extensive studies in Anthropology.

By the time Hurston published her signature work Their Eyes Were Watching God, the freestyle experimentalism of the Harlem Renaissance was being increasingly overcast by the Great Depression. As a result, a backlash ensued. Their Eyes Were Watching God, which told of a woman named Janie Crawford who goes through three marriages to separate men as she struggles to realize herself, was too steeped in the experimentalism of the Renaissance to please critics. Furthermore, her portrayal of a black woman's search for personal liberation was too much for many black men to stomach. Richard Wright, the acclaimed author of Native Son, even dismissed Their Eyes Were Watching God for not being "serious fiction." Today, such criticism may seem absurd, or at the very least, incredibly short-sighted, but at the time, Hurston's daring prose was not in vogue amongst the social realists.

Their Eyes Were Watching God, instead, displays a true structural adventurousness, splitting between the eloquence of the narrative voice and the idiomatic, ungrammatical dialogue of the black, southern characters. While works of the social realism movement were easily categorized by their left-wing politics and gritty delivery, Their Eyes Were Watching God was less simple to pigeonhole. It is at once a product of the Harlem Renaissance, an example of Southern literature along the lines of Faulkner, and a work of feminist literature. Consequently, the novel was criticized for being out of step with the times, and it went out of print very shortly after being published, leading to the collapse of Hurston's career and her standing as a significant literary figure.

Hurston would die in 1960, back in Florida, destitute, forgotten. Her books long unavailable, her death barely registered. She would not return to the public eye until 1975, when Alice Walker published an essay titled "In Search of Zora Neale Hurston" in Ms. magazine. Along with other writer including Robert Hemenway and Tony Cade Bambara, Walker went on a crusade to revitalize Hurston's career fifteen years after the writer's death.

When Their Eyes Were Watching God was finally republished, it was reevaluated as a classic. Today, the novel is required reading in universities all over the country, and Hurston is widely acknowledged as one of the first great African-American women writers. As a final tribute to her idol, Walker also traveled to Florida where Hurston is buried and placed a marker on her grave, a long-overdue tribute to a great American writer reading with beautiful simplicity: "Zora Neale Hurston: Genius of the South."

Good To Know

Hurston's earliest work was a comedic play called Mule Bone, which she co-wrote with Langston Hughes. However, the play would not be performed until 1991 due to an arduous legal battle that also brought an untimely end to the friendship between Hurston and Hughes.

Spike Lee's audacious debut film She's Gotta Have It has been viewed by some as a hip adaptation of Their Eyes Were Watching God, and the fact that the film opens with a quotation from Zora Neale Hurston may prove such theories correct.

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Editorials

The Los Angeles Times

In this large, new volume of Hurston's collected letters, however, we have a real contribution to our understanding of her life. — Vivian Gornick,

Publishers Weekly

Many of the questions that Hurston scholars have asked are addressed, and occasionally answered, in this momentous collection of letters by one of the leading figures of the Harlem Renaissance: Why did she constantly alter her age? Did she take a job as a maid toward the end of her life out of desperation or, as she claimed, for a lark? Why did she switch from writing about blacks to writing about whites? And why didn't she ever write anything about her teen years? Kaplan, a leading Hurston scholar at the University of Southern California, calls the letters "one of the few existing sources of personal commentary by a black female intellectual on American life and literature." Spanning the 1920s to the 1950s, Hurston's letters reveal an energetic writer of many voices. The collection includes confiding, sharp-tongued missives to close friends Langston Hughes and Carl Van Vechten; correspondence with Franz Boas, one of the fathers of American anthropology and Hurston's mentor at Barnard College; and her saccharine (and perhaps ironic) notes of gratitude and supplication to wealthy white patron Charlotte Osgood Mason. A portrait emerges of a heterodox woman who alienated many of her supporters with her increasingly conservative politics and was hampered all her life by financial troubles and romantic disappointments. At 864 pages, this volume contains numerous mundane letters, but it is a comprehensive document of the notoriously unself-revealing woman, beautifully executed. Illus. (On sale Oct. 1) Forecast: Given Hurston's belated prominence, this will receive major review coverage, though some reviews may be delayed to be joined with Valerie Boyd's Wrapped in Rainbows: The Life of Zora Neale Hurston, which Scribner publishes in January. Copyright 2002 Cahners Business Information.

KLIATT

In her introduction to this valuable study, Carla Kaplan, a Hurston scholar, notes that Zora Neale Hurston lived in an era when letter writing was the way to communicate with friends and associates. And communicate Hurston did. From 1917 to 1959, she wrote to her teachers, her benefactors, her editors, her colleagues and her friends. She left behind her a brilliant if not always self-revealing record of her ambitions, her triumphs, and her pain. Kaplan has arranged these letters by decade and she provides the reader with a carefully documented and clearly written account of Hurston's life during each decade as an introduction to each segment of letters. The reader who might not have read Hurston beyond a required reading of Their Eyes Were Watching God is supplied thereby with a framework that is a guide through the letters, a chronicle that places Hurston's correspondence in perspective. Kaplan also provides the reader with a summary chronology of Hurston's life and a detailed glossary that carefully identifies every person mentioned in the letters. A bibliography of Hurston's own works as well as a selected bibliography for the study of Hurston is also included. Highly recommended for anyone seriously interested in Hurston. KLIATT Codes: SA—Recommended for senior high school students, advanced students, and adults. 2002, Random House, Anchor, 880p. illus. index., Ages 15 to adult.
—Patricia Moore

Library Journal

Arguably one of the most significant figures in the African American literary tradition of the 20th century, Zora Neal Hurston (1891-1960) has only recently been acknowledged for her superb achievements. The author of four novels, including the highly acclaimed Their Eyes Were Watching God (1937), plus an autobiography, numerous essays, and two books on black folklore, she became the first black student to graduate from Barnard College and later studied anthropology at Columbia. A principal in the Harlem Renaissance, she shared fame with her contemporaries, including Langston Hughes and Dorothy West. But recognition was limited; Hurston had to endure a string of menial jobs and died penniless and obscure. This collection of over 500 letters, chronologically arranged and carefully edited and annotated by noted Hurston scholar Kaplan, reveals a gifted yet complex personality at once humorous, cynical, and analytical. These letters to friends, editors, fellow writers, and others trace a life of humble beginnings, turmoil, and frustrations. Interest in Hurston is on the rise, as indicated by the recent publication of Every Tongue Got to Confess, a recently rediscovered collection of folklore she gathered, recommending this for all academic libraries and larger public libraries with extensive literature collections. Richard K. Burns, MSLS, Hatboro, PA Copyright 2002 Cahners Business Information.