Nevertheless, since Alice Walker’s “In Search of Zora Neale Hurston” appeared in Ms. In this respect, she was the unlikeliest possible candidate for canonization by the black- and women’s-studies departments. Southern literature was filled with Negro portraits not so different from that of Bigger Thomas, the hero of Wright’s 1940 bombshell, “Native Son.” In the making of a revolution, all that had shifted was the author’s color and the blame.Īs for Hurston, the most brazenly impious of the Harlem literary avant-garde-she called them “the niggerati”-she had never fit happily within any political group. In American fiction, after all, there was nothing new in the image of the black man as an inarticulate savage for whom rape and murder were a nearly inevitable means of expression. The advent of Richard Wright was a political event as much as a literary one. That famed outpouring of novels and poems and plays of the twenties, anxiously demonstrating the Negro’s humanity and cultural citizenship, counted for nothing against the bludgeoning facts of the Depression, the Scottsboro trials, and the first-ever riot in Harlem itself, in 1935. For the first time in America, a substantial white audience preferred to be shot at.īlack anger had come out of hiding, out of the ruins of the Harlem Renaissance and its splendid illusions of justice willingly offered up to art. It says something about the social complexity of the next few years that it was Wright who became a Book-of-the-Month Club favorite, while Hurston’s work went out of print and she nearly starved. Worse, he accused Hurston of cynically perpetuating a minstrel tradition meant to make white audiences laugh. Reviewing Hurston’s novel “Their Eyes Were Watching God” in the New Masses the previous fall, he had dismissed her prose for its “facile sensuality”-a problem in Negro writing that he traced to the first black American female to earn literary fame, the slave Phillis Wheatley. Wright, the troubling newcomer, had already challenged her authority to speak for their race. “There is lavish killing here,” she wrote, “perhaps enough to satisfy all male black readers.” Hurston, who had swept onto the Harlem scene a decade before, was one of the very few black women in a position to write for the pallidly conventional Saturday Review. Richard Wright’s first published book, “Uncle Tom’s Children,” was made up of four novellas set in a Dismal Swamp of race hatred, in which not a single act of understanding or sympathy occurred, and in which the white man was generally shot dead. In the spring of 1938, Zora Neale Hurston informed readers of the Saturday Review of Literature that Mr. New York, NY: Columbia University Libraries, 2013.First celebrated, then vilified, and finally idolized, Hurston is a writer who still raises difficult questions. "Zora Neale Hurston." In Jane Gaines, Radha Vatsal, and Monica Dall’Asta, eds. (Bay Bottom News & American Masters US 2008). Zora Neale Hurston: Jump at the Sun. DVD. (Kino Lorber US 2018) - contains ethnographic films from 1929
Pioneers: First Women Filmmakers. DVD/Blu-ray. (Kino Lorber US 2016) - contains Zora Neale Hurston Fieldwork Footage (excerpt) (1928). Pioneers of African-American Cinema. DVD. Dir: Zora Neale Hurston (1929) si, b&w, 16mm. Dir: Zora Neale Hurston (1928) si, b&w, 16mm. Dir: Zora Neale Hurston (US 1928) si, b&w, 16mm. Archival Filmography: Extant Film Titles:Ĭhildren’s Games. The bibliography for this essay is included in the “ African-American Women in the Silent Film Industry” overview essay. Hurston, looking back, wrote about her relationship to the novelist four years after the 1933 publication of Hurst’s famous passing novel Imitation of Life.
Finally, a footnote in Antonia Lant’s Red Velvet Seat tells us that Hurston worked as screenwriter and novelist Fannie Hurst’s personal assistant from 1925-26 and went on to a job as a staff screenwriter at Paramount Studios in 1941 (795). The 1930 play “Mule Bone” could be seen as reflecting Hurston’s concern with “authenticity” that at least one critic has attributed to her training as an anthropologist (Carson, 123).
That project along with other dramatic works by Hurston led to a collaborative project with Langston Hughes.
Her prize-winning 1925 play “Color Struck” attracted the attention of members of the Harlem Renaissance. While these films are considered by Gibson to most likely be an element of her research on folklore of African-Americans, Hurston was also a playwright. Courtesy of Yale University, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library.
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