Novelist Zora Neale Hurston and poet Langston Hughes, two of America's greatest writers, first met in New York City in 1925. Drawn to each other, they launched a radical journal. Later, meeting by accident in Alabama, they became close as they travelled together-Hurston interviewing African Americans for folk stories, Hughes getting his first taste of the deep South. By illuminating their lives, work, competitiveness and ambitions, Yuval Taylor savvily explores how their friendship and literary collaborations would end in acrimonious accusations.
Yuval Taylor is the coauthor of Darkest America: Black Minstrelsy from Slavery to Hip-Hop and Faking It: The Quest for Authenticity in Popular Music. His writing has appeared in the Guardian, the Antioch Review, the Oxford American, and other publications. He lives in Chicago.
Title: Zora and Langston: A Story of Friendship and Betrayal
Author: Yuval Taylor
ISBN: 9780393358100
Binding:
Publisher: WW Norton & Co
Publication Date: 2020-08-21
Number of Pages: 336
Weight: 0.2721 kg
The greatest feat... lies in Taylor's loving yet evenhanded portraits. One of the most compelling and consequential relationships in black literary history. -- Zinzi Clemmons - The New York Times Book Review
Writing in a vivid anecdotal style, Taylor's book carries readers along on the giddy, and ultimately, very bumpy ride. -- Maureen Corrigan - NPR
Compelling, concise and scrupulously researched [A] wonderful book. -- Clifford Thompson - The Wall Street Journal
Cullors says that, after this interview, she will turn off her phone and continue reading Zora and Langston to decompress. Yuval Taylor's biography charts the friendship and falling out of novelist Zora Neale Hurston and poet Langston Hughes. Their works helped define the Harlem Renaissance, a flowering of African-American artistic and intellectual expression in the 1920s. Two chapters in, her review is inspiring, amazing and juicy . -- Patrisse Cullors, Co-founder of Black Lives Matter - Financial Times
