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Zora Neale Hurston: A Life in Letters - Softcover

Kaplan Ph.D., Carla

 
9780385490368: Zora Neale Hurston: A Life in Letters
Softcover
ISBN 10: 0385490364 ISBN 13: 9780385490368
Verlag: Anchor, 2003

Inhaltsangabe

“ 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 Carla Kaplan, a noted Hurston scholar, has found hundreds of revealing, previously unpublished letters for this definitive collection; she also provides extensive and illuminating commentary on Hurston’s life and work, as well as an annotated glossary of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.

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Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

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.

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"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.

Aus dem Klappentext

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.

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Chapter 1

"DE TALKIN' GAME"

The Twenties (and Before)

First and foremost a storyteller, with profound appreciation for the power of a well-crafted tale, Hurston moved to New York in 1925 and used her storytelling talent to refashion her life along mythic lines, erasing everything that didn't contribute to the new person she had determined to create. That person would have known hardships and hard times, but mostly in a general way. She might have disappointments, but they would never become obstacles. She would be tough and independent and young (in her early twenties, like her friends). Above all, she would be game for everything, full of enthusiasm and ideas. Nothing would be beyond her. She would live up to her proud heritage as a daughter of Eatonville, America's first incorporated all-black town--even if that meant starting over from scratch.

Accordingly, the only full-scale biography of Zora Neale Hurston starts by describing how "in the first week of January, 1925, Zora Neale Hurston arrived in New York."1 Hurston begins her life over again in the twenties, establishing herself as a writer, social scientist, and active member of the nation's first major upsurge of African American arts.

During this period, she developed her own aesthetic: an embroidered realism equally committed to liveliness and accuracy. Her developing style as a writer mirrored her personality: hardheaded and sentimental, constrained and effusive, objective and fanciful, all at the same time. The Harlem Renaissance--for all its own self-conscious mythmaking--afforded Hurston the necessary ground on which to build this new life. It gave her a collective enterprise in which she could play a valued role. Among its many circles she could find the publishers, editors, writers, artists, scientists, intellectuals, producers, directors, and patrons she needed to develop all the venues in which she sought to bring the African American vernacular to the American public. This period opened the door to a number of intimate friendships, an inner circle of confidants among whom Hurston hoped to find soulmates who could bridge their differences of race, class, gender, and upbringing. Characteristically, Hurston seemed unfazed by the dazzle of New York's Roaring Twenties. Whereas Harlem was a revelation for many African Americans who had never before been in such a teeming community of black people, Hurston had been raised in an all-black town and was well accustomed to urban life by 1925. She knew that this brief flourishing of America's interest in black culture was a golden moment-perhaps she even sensed how very fleeting that fascination would be-and she wasted no time in using it to advance her personal and artistic goals.

Fashioning a serious career in this period meant becoming a good correspondent, keeping in touch with colleagues, friends, agents, editors, and publishers. Frequently, Hurston wrote multiple letters on a given day. Occasionally, she wrote more than one letter in a day to the same person. As far as can be determined, only one letter survives from earlier than the mid-twenties, although it is almost certain that she wrote to family and friends when she was attending Morgan State Academy and later Howard Preparatory. Without such a record, however, much of her early life remains a mystery. This may be how she wanted it.

What Hurston has written of her early years is peculiar. In her autobiography, Dust Tracks on a Road, she offers a story of her origins that reads like pure fiction. She even marks it as "hear-say," a tall tale in the American tradition she called "lying."
As she tells it, her mother found herself without benefit of midwife, friend, or the strength to "even reach down to where I was."2 If an elderly white gentleman had not chanced on her birthing, she would surely have died. Like a "fairy godmother," he counsels Hurston on her future. Included in his advice is an admonition not to "be a nigger" because "Niggers lie and lie." Hurston's only comment on this strange advice is to insist that he was color-blind and harmless. Why did Hurston choose to repeat--or invent--that story in her autobiography? Was she positioning herself as a daughter of two worlds, black and white? Was she suggesting that white patronage--for good or ill--had always been a feature of her life? Did she want her life to read like a racial fairy tale? Or to make a parody of American fairy tales of race?

Wherever we look for information on Hurston's early life, we find interesting fictions she has left behind. The birth dates she gave for herself throughout her life-1898, 1899, 1900, 1901, 1902, 1903, and 1910-are all inaccurate, as scholars have recently discovered.3 Hurston was born on January 15, 1891, making her between seven and nineteen years older than she claimed.4 Neither was she actually born in Eatonville, as she claimed.

Like her parents, Hurston was born in Notasulga, Alabama, a place she describes as "an outlying district of landless Negroes, and whites not too much better off. It was 'over the creek,' which was just like saying on the wrong side of the railroad tracks…There was no rise to the thing." Hurston speculates that "the ordeal of share-cropping on a southern Alabama cotton plantation was crushing to [her father's] ambition."

If Alabama was a desolate place, with conditions one longtime resident described as "outrageous [in] every way that you can think,"5 Eatonville, Florida, when the Hurstons arrived in 1892,6 represented opportunity. The Hurstons prospered there. Hurston's father, John, became a Baptist minister and pastor of the Macedonia Baptist Church, then served as Eatonville's mayor from 1912 to 1916. John Hurston was known as "a vocal and knowledgeable politician...instrumental in the development of some of Eatonville's first municipal laws."7

Eatonville was a fascinating small town founded in 1887 (Hurston gives the date as 1886), distinguished by being the nation's first incorporated black town-and perhaps the nation's oldest continually all-black town as well.8 Hurston's Eatonville is more distinguished yet: a utopian, imagined world where blacks lived near whites "without a single instance of enmity," people lived a "simple" life of "open kindnesses, anger, hate, love, [and] envy," "you got what your strengths would bring you," and where the Hurston family enjoyed a nice "piece of ground with two big Chinaberry trees shading the front gate," many bushes and flowers, "plenty of orange, grapefruit, tangerine, guavas and other fruits in our yard," and an eight-room house. In Hurston's Eatonville, "we had all that we wanted."

Jonah's Gourd Vine, Hurston's first novel, is largely autobiographical and one of two novels (the other never published) that Hurston set in Eatonville. It provides as much (maybe more) information about Hurston's early life as anything else she wrote, including her own autobiography. John "Buddy" Pearson, modeled on Hurston's father, John, is a larger-than-life character. He can carry his little brother "under his arm like a shock of corn." He is a "fine stud" and "splendid specimen" who grows into manhood as "a walking orgasm" and "a living exultation."9 John's sexual energy leads to "meandering" that proves fatal. Like this character, Hurston's father was so powerful that his children called him "Big Nigger." Like John Pearson, he was without "steering gear," a man whose "share" of weaknesses derailed his life and sabotaged his daughter's. He and Hurston were estranged for years. When he died on August 10, 1918, in Memphis,...

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Verlag
Anchor
Erscheinungsdatum
2003
Sprache
Englisch
ISBN 10 
0385490364
ISBN 13 
9780385490368
Einband
Taschenbuch
Anzahl der Seiten
912
Kontakt zum Hersteller
Nicht verfügbar
Verantwortliche Person
Purmerul LTD
https://strengholt.nl/en/

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