Zora and Langston, Yuval Taylor
Zora and Langston, Yuval Taylor
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Zora and Langston
A Story of Friendship and Betrayal

Author: Yuval Taylor

Narrator: Bahni Turpin

Unabridged: 8 hr 39 min

Format: Digital Audiobook Download

Published: 05/14/2019


Synopsis

Zora and Langston is the dramatic and moving story of one of the most influential friendships in literature.

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.

About Yuval Taylor

Yuval Taylor is the author of Zora and Langston: A Story of Friendship and Betrayal and coauthor of Darkest America: Black Minstrelsy from Slavery to Hip-Hop and Faking It: The Quest for Authenticity in Popular Music. He has edited three volumes of African American slave narratives, and his writings have appeared in the Antioch Review, the Guardian, and other publications. He lives in Chicago.


Reviews

Goodreads review by Emma

What a rich and complicated book, modern and lovely and wise. I learned so much, I became enraged and confused--Godmother! why??!!--and I hurt for these two people who were so much for each other and could have been so much more. I wish it had been less faithful to chronology and more character/narr......more

I am embarrassed to admit that I have read very little of the works of either writers who are the subject of this book. But having read it, I am committed to delving into that pool. I don't believe I have the right to comment much further on this until I have a better grasp on my own of each author's......more

Goodreads review by Raymond

I have read quite a few books that briefly covered the friendship and spat between Zora Neale Hurston and Langston Hughes (Mule Bone, Zora Neale Hurston: A Literary Biography, Wrapped in Rainbows: The Life of Zora Neale Hurston). However, Yuval Taylor's book does this relationship justice, he gives......more