…an overdue study of the famous yet underdiscussed friendship and literary collaboration…Zora and Langston refocuses our attention on the positive aspects of their relationship, while doing its best to explain—through historical records and firsthand research—what really brought their friendship to an end…At key moments throughout the book, Taylor takes care to remind his readers that although both writers were pioneers who brought blackness into the literary canon…their delight in the concept of blackness could occasionally veer into the exploitative, sometimes propagating negative stereotypes of black people. Their legacies should account for both tendencies, and the greatest feat of Zora and Langston perhaps lies in Taylor's loving yet evenhanded portraits of both figures…It is a highly readable account of one of the most compelling and consequential relationships in black literary history, and the time is ripe for this story to reach a new generation of readers.
Zora and Langston: A Story of Friendship and Betrayal
Narrated by Bahni Turpin
Yuval TaylorUnabridged — 8 hours, 39 minutes
Zora and Langston: A Story of Friendship and Betrayal
Narrated by Bahni Turpin
Yuval TaylorUnabridged — 8 hours, 39 minutes
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Overview
They were best friends. They were collaborators, literary gadflies, and champions of the common people. They were the leading lights of the Harlem Renaissance. Zora Neale Hurston, the author of Their Eyes Were Watching God, and Langston Hughes, the author of "The Negro Speaks of Rivers" and "Let America Be America Again," first met in 1925, at a great gathering of black and white literati, and they fascinated each other. They traveled together in Hurston's dilapidated car through the rural South collecting folklore, worked on the play Mule Bone, and wrote scores of loving letters. They even had the same patron: Charlotte Osgood Mason, a wealthy white woman who insisted on being called "Godmother."
Paying them lavishly while trying to control their work, Mason may have been the spark for their bitter and passionate falling-out. Was the split inevitable when Hughes decided to be financially independent of his patron? Was Hurston jealous of the young woman employed as their typist? Or was the rupture over the authorship of Mule Bone? Yuval Taylor answers these questions while illuminating Hurston's and Hughes's lives, work, competitiveness, and ambition, uncovering little-known details.
Editorial Reviews
12/10/2018
Taylor (Faking It, coauthor), a senior editor at Chicago Review Press, offers a highly readable and informative take on the friendship and subsequent falling-out between two stars of the Harlem Renaissance, Langston Hughes and Zora Neale Hurston. The two met in New York City during Harlem’s cultural heyday and struck up a close friendship as they traveled the South together, where Hurston gathered African-American folklore for a book. They shared a desire to, as Taylor puts it, “get inside the folkways of the African American community and to encompass them in all their variety.” They also shared a bond in being supported financially by the same woman, the wealthy, and white, Charlotte Mason. One of the most bizarre and fascinating aspects of their lives was the intrusion of this highly controlling figure, fixated on the idea that the culture of black Americans was more primitive and pure than that of whites. The book offers an overlong and needlessly detailed look at the complicated fight over the pair’s coauthored play Mule-Bone, which ended their friendship. Nevertheless, Taylor paints a sympathetic but realistic portrait of these two complicated artists and convincingly shows that, together, they changed the course of African-American literature, as the “first great American writers who implicitly claimed that their work was purely black.” (Mar.)
"Rich and nuanced."
"A vivid account.… Taylor offers a snapshot of a cultural moment, illuminating two essential voices in American literature."
"Taylor examines here perhaps the single most controversial set of personal and professional relationships in African American literature, centered in the iconic duo of Hughes and Hurston but including other unforgettable figures, white as well as black. Digging vigorously in sources new and known, he reconstructs this drama in clear, lively, and elegant if sometimes unsparing prose. This is a dazzling book, easy to read but richly rewarding."
"Taylor has created an intimate portrait of two luminaries of American literature against a backdrop of the cultural, political, and economic forces that influenced them."
"Loving yet evenhanded portraits of both figures.… A highly readable account of one of the most compelling and consequential relationships in black literary history."
"Writing in a vivid anecdotal style, Taylor's book carries readers along on the giddy, and ultimately, very bumpy ride…Let's focus, as Taylor so evocatively does, on the blossoming of the great friendship between an aspiring Hurston and Hughes, on the wide road opening up before them and on the gifts they shared with each other and with us."
"The extraordinary friendship between Zora Neale Hurston and Langston Hughes produced one of the richest collaborations in American literature, though much of what they created never found its way to the public. Yuval Taylor digs deeply into the existing scholarship on both writers—and their times—to explore this unusual intimacy and the tragedy of its collapse. The story of their friendship returns us to the brilliant work of these writers. And it reminds us of all we have lost since these two American geniuses were forced to let each other go."
"An intriguing story about the most confounding and fascinating literary breakup in African American cultural history. Rich in atmosphere and detail, Zora and Langston takes readers deep into the heart of the Harlem Renaissance and the brief but marvelous bond between the leading luminaries of their day."
"Compelling, concise and scrupulously researched."
"A fascinating and lively story of two iconoclastic writers."
"A complete pleasure to read."
"Intriguing, funny.… The lives of Hurston and Hughes continue to be fabulous and exciting."
"Taylor’s new book provides details never before revealed of how both left indelible marks on American literature and each other."
"Taylor draws on fresh material… bringing two legendary and complicated African American writers to life."
Narrator Bahni Turpin engages the listener with this complex dual biography of writers Zora Neale Hurston and Langston Hughes. While both are known as luminaries of the Harlem Renaissance, this audiobook explores the lesser known aspects of their friendship and collaboration throughout the 1920s and ‘30s, which ended in a bitter split. Turpin keeps the pace of the work flowing even as she covers dense biographical background, as well as the development of African-American literary society of the time. Her pleasingly neutral tones for the narrative make the passages in which she voices the boisterous Hurston and the mercurial Hughes stand out in contrast. The listener will delight in discovering how these two exceptional people understood themselves and each other. N.M. Winner of AudioFile Earphones Award, 2019 Best Audiobook © AudioFile 2019, Portland, Maine
2018-12-09
The tale of a famous literary friendship that ended in bitterness.
Zora Neale Hurston (1891-1960) and Langston Hughes (1901-1967) were major figures of the Harlem Renaissance and, for several years, collaborators and loving friends. Taylor (co-author: Darkest America: Black Minstrelsy from Slavery to Hip-Hop, 2012, etc.), senior editor at the Chicago Review Press, places their friendship at the center of a revealing examination of the alliances, betrayals, rivalries, and aspirations that characterized the African-American literary and arts world in the 1920s and beyond. In 1926, Hurston bestowed the nickname "Niggerati" on the many young writers and artists, "opposed to the literary conventions of the older generation of the black elite," who gathered in Manhattan for social and literary activities. They were supported—sometimes with publicity, sometimes financially—by admiring white New Yorkers Hurston called "Negrotarians," including Carl Van Vechten, Hart Crane, Muriel Draper, Max Eastman, Eugene O'Neill, George Gershwin, and H.L. Mencken. Foremost among them was Charlotte Mason, an heiress who inherited her husband's vast wealth after his death in 1905. Among her passions were parapsychology, psychic healing, and African-Americans and Indians, who she believed were unsullied by "the ills of civilization" and possessed of "primitive creativity and spirituality [that] would energize and renew America." A major collector of African art, she disdained white culture, declaring herself "eternally black." In 1927, she decided to become a personal patron to many figures of the Niggerati. She must be called Godmother, she insisted, and demanded nothing less than complete filial devotion in exchange for monthly stipends of $150 (for Hughes) and $200 (for Hurston) to allow them to pursue their work. Mason, Taylor writes, was "a jealous god, controlling and wrathful," dictating what kind of projects her "children" pursued and, in Hurston's case, prohibiting her from showing her writing to anyone without Mason's consent. Drawing on published and archival sources, Taylor creates a perceptive portrait of the bizarre patron and of the Hurston-Hughes friendship.
A fresh look at two important writers of the 1920s.
Product Details
| BN ID: | 2940170244423 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | HighBridge Company |
| Publication date: | 05/14/2019 |
| Edition description: | Unabridged |
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