Review: Three Biographies on Zora Neale Hurston

Zora Neale Hurston: A Literary Biography; Wrapped in Rainbows: The Life of Zora Neale Hurston; and Zora and Langston: A Story of Friendship and Betrayal

The three reviews were first published on Goodreads in 2023. They have been edited.

Zora Neale Hurston: A Literary Biography by Robert E. Hemenway (1977)

This is a great book to check out after you read most of Zora’s published works. Hemenway chronicles Zora’s life by highlighting and critically analyzing her many books, short stories, articles, plays, and other writings that span four decades. Hemenway essentially covers Hurston’s trajectory as a writer from her early days of writing short stories during the Harlem Renaissance, to her anthropologist days when she collected folklore in Eatonville and other parts of the South, to her stint writing creative fiction in the 1930s, and finally to her last decades when she took a more political turn writing articles for magazines while still trying to publish books that were later rejected.

I enjoyed reading about the contemporary reception of her works as well as Hemenway’s analysis of it. As the subtitle says this is “A Literary Biography” and focuses more on her writing and to a lesser extent on her relationships, the author states in the Preface that this is not a “definitive” biography. Hemenway does give extensive coverage to Hurston’s contentious relationship with figures like Langston Hughes, Mary McCleod Bethune, Alain Locke, and others.

Finally, I highly recommend you read the Foreword by Alice Walker, who is responsible for bringing Zora back to the forefront of American literature. Walker states that Hemenway’s work on Zora inspired her to go search for Hurston’s grave. I especially love when Walker states that Zora, Billie Holiday, and Bessie Smith form an “unholy trinity”.

Wrapped in Rainbows: The Life of Zora Neale Hurston by Valerie Boyd (2002)

“She wanted not only books to read, but the kind of life that could fill a book.” -Valerie Boyd, Wrapped in Rainbows (p, 59)

Zora Neale Hurston indeed lived a “kind of life that could fill a book” and Valerie Boyd was one of the best writers to do that. I read Wrapped in Rainbows after Robert Hemenway’s biography of Hurston (mentioned above). Hemenway does a great job but as the subtitle suggests his biography of Hurston was more literary criticism of her works than a comprehensive look at her life. Valerie Boyd gives you a nice blend of both Hurston as a person and Hurston as a writer and scholar. It is a more personal biography of Hurston, where you learn about Zora as a reader and her other interests in addition to her relationships with Langston Hughes, Charlotte Osgood Mason, James Weldon Johnson, and more. It’s a great book to read after you read all of her books because it allows the reader to put her works into context.

Zora and Langston: A Story of Friendship and Betrayal by Yuval Taylor (2019)

Hemenway and Boyd in their respective biographies both briefly covered the friendship and spat between Zora Neale Hurston and Langston Hughes. It is also covered at length in the supplemental material of Hurston and Hughes’s play Mule Bone. However, Yuval Taylor’s book does this relationship justice, he gives the most comprehensive and definitive account of their relationship. He covers how Zora and Langston met, their loving friendship, their collaboration on a play called Mule Bone, and the ultimate fallout of the relationship. Taylor, in my opinion, is not biased towards one writer over the other, he calls them out when they both lied in their recollection of events. In that respect, the book comes across as a balanced portrayal. Zora and Langston were both at fault over the dissolution of their friendship and at the same time were super admiring of each other and their artistic gifts. Outside figures were instigating. One of the important parts of this book is that it corrects the narrative that the prior literature stated that Zora and Langston never saw each other after the Mule Bone fallout, Taylor shows this wasn’t true. Zora and Langston saw and possibly spoke to each other at least once or twice in the intervening years. Lastly, I love how Taylor closed the book with the “last living link” between Zora and Langston.