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A Life in Letters
“ I mean to live and die by my own mind,” Zora Neale Hurston told the writer Countee Cullen. Arriving in Harlem in 1925 with little more than a dollar to her name, Hurston rose to become one of the central figures of the Harlem Renaissance, only to die in obscurity. Not until the 1970s was she rediscovered by Alice Walker and other admirers. Although Hurston has entered the pantheon as one of the most influential American writers of the 20th century, the true nature of her personality has proven elusive.
Now, a brilliant, complicated and utterly arresting woman emerges from this landmark book. Carla Kaplan, a noted Hurston scholar, has found hundreds of revealing, previously unpublished letters for this definitive collection; she also provides extensive and illuminating commentary on Hurston’s life and work, as well as an annotated glossary of the organizations and personalities that were important to it.
From her enrollment at Baltimore’s Morgan Academy in 1917, to correspondence with Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings, Langston Hughes, Dorothy West and Alain Locke, to a final query letter to her publishers in 1959, Hurston’s spirited correspondence offers an invaluable portrait of a remarkable, irrepressible talent.
Now, a brilliant, complicated and utterly arresting woman emerges from this landmark book. Carla Kaplan, a noted Hurston scholar, has found hundreds of revealing, previously unpublished letters for this definitive collection; she also provides extensive and illuminating commentary on Hurston’s life and work, as well as an annotated glossary of the organizations and personalities that were important to it.
From her enrollment at Baltimore’s Morgan Academy in 1917, to correspondence with Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings, Langston Hughes, Dorothy West and Alain Locke, to a final query letter to her publishers in 1959, Hurston’s spirited correspondence offers an invaluable portrait of a remarkable, irrepressible talent.
912 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 2002
37 people are currently reading
1383 people want to read
About the author
Zora Neale Hurston
185 books5,424 followersNovels, including
Their Eyes Were Watching God
(1937), and nonfiction writings of American folklorist Zora Neale Hurston give detailed accounts of African American life in the South.
In 1925, Hurston, one of the leaders of the literary renaissance, happening in Harlem, produced the short-lived literary magazine Fire!! alongside Langston Hughes and Wallace Thurman shortly before she entered Barnard College. This literary movement developed into the Harlem renaissance.
Hurston applied her Barnard ethnographic training to document African American folklore in her critically acclaimed book Mules and Men alongside fiction Their Eyes Were Watching God . She also assembled a folk-based performance dance group that recreated her Southern tableau with one performance on Broadway.
People awarded a Guggenheim fellowship to Hurston to travel to Haiti and conduct research on conjure in 1937. Her significant work ably broke into the secret societies and exposed their use of drugs to create the Vodun trance, also a subject of study for fellow dancer-anthropologist Katherine Dunham, then at the University of Chicago.
In 1954, the Pittsburgh Courier assigned Hurston, unable to sell her fiction, to cover the small-town murder trial of Ruby McCollum, the prosperous black wife of the local lottery racketeer, who had killed a racist white doctor. Hurston also contributed to Woman in the Suwanee County Jail , a book by journalist and civil rights advocate William Bradford Huie.
In 1925, Hurston, one of the leaders of the literary renaissance, happening in Harlem, produced the short-lived literary magazine Fire!! alongside Langston Hughes and Wallace Thurman shortly before she entered Barnard College. This literary movement developed into the Harlem renaissance.
Hurston applied her Barnard ethnographic training to document African American folklore in her critically acclaimed book Mules and Men alongside fiction Their Eyes Were Watching God . She also assembled a folk-based performance dance group that recreated her Southern tableau with one performance on Broadway.
People awarded a Guggenheim fellowship to Hurston to travel to Haiti and conduct research on conjure in 1937. Her significant work ably broke into the secret societies and exposed their use of drugs to create the Vodun trance, also a subject of study for fellow dancer-anthropologist Katherine Dunham, then at the University of Chicago.
In 1954, the Pittsburgh Courier assigned Hurston, unable to sell her fiction, to cover the small-town murder trial of Ruby McCollum, the prosperous black wife of the local lottery racketeer, who had killed a racist white doctor. Hurston also contributed to Woman in the Suwanee County Jail , a book by journalist and civil rights advocate William Bradford Huie.
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Displaying 1 - 13 of 13 reviews
May 24, 2025
You must read this collection of 600+ letters if you are a fan of Zora Neale Hurston. In these letters to various people stretching across four decades, Hurston shares her feelings about other historical figures, previews her folklore research and book writing, and shares her views on race relations in the country. I enjoyed reading her pieces of wisdom she had to share with the letter's recipients. Although I wish we had the replies to Zora, I wonder if those are available to read in the archives, or were they lost in the burning of her papers? I also found her views on politics interesting, especially when she made a prescient comment about how she could see how America's political parties were going to become polarized. Lastly, I kept a tally of all the books she mentioned that she read in her letters. I came up with at least 13. I'll look into seeing if I'll read any of them.
February 7, 2014
Wow!!!! Complex, complex, COMPLEX! Soror, Zora... Wow!!! A must read for those who love her work. To read these letters is like watching a throw-back Facebook and Twitter. Grab the popcorn and... just WOW. She was intense, she was beautiful, she was stubborn, she was beautiful, she was creative and imaginative, she was beautiful, she was happy and anger, she was hurt and bitter, she was loyal and forgiving, she was cunning and flippant, she was BEAUTIFUL AND HUMAN. I treasure her in all her complexity. These letters will make you smile, and laugh, and cry, and scratch your head, and spit forth a few "Chile Please!". My sorority sister, my inspiration, my mule-boned, lingo spittin' sister from another mister - Thank You!
March 16, 2015
Took me a year to finish this book of letters. what a remarkably complex life. (At last, I know what happened between her and Langston and the Mule Bone play. I always believed it was Zora's work alone.)
December 31, 2015
As a huge ZNH fan, I don't know how it gets any better than actually reading the letters she had written. What could get you closer to the lady herself than being a part of the most intimate thoughts she was willing to share.
March 8, 2015
Captivating, Fascinating & Compelling! I Loved It!
April 3, 2018
Anything by Zora Neale Hurston works for me. This book was close to 900 pages, though. I was able to finish it and get a better understanding of the person vs the writer.
April 18, 2019
Her enthusiasm for the work she did is infectious. At one point she lists about eight projects that she has in the works. She had a sense of mission, and it seems to have fueled everything she did.
April 28, 2008
Really interesting insight to Ms. Hurston's life, though at times I felt like I was intruding on something private by reading her correspondence. But I think you truly learn the person more by listening/reading the words from their mouth/pen than by reading the words of someone else about them.
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January 10, 2008I love letter collections and actually should read more of them; they offer such a wonderfully intimate view of the writer's life.
January 7, 2015
Unfortunately, these letters are only Zora's responses, but they are very interesting to read. A great companion to Boyd's biography.
January 11, 2009
It was a bit long but I liked learning about this woman and how she created one of the classic works despite being so down trodden.
October 2, 2020
I have loved her work all my life so this was an exceptional treat!
Displaying 1 - 13 of 13 reviews