Where to start with / Zora Neale Hurston

Where to start with: Zora Neale Hurston

This article is more than 3 months old

From befriending the last African enslaved in the US to meeting with zombies in Haiti, the folklorist, anthropologist and Harlem Renaissance writer – who has a novel posthumously published today – was a sensitive chronicler of other people’s 

Colin Grant

Tue 7 Jan 2025 16.23

Today, on what would have been Zora Neale Hurston’s 134th birthday, a posthumous novel by the American writer and cultural anthropologist has been published. The Life of Herod the Great, which Hurston was working on when she died in 1960, is a sequel to her 1939 novel Moses, Man of the Mountain, and up until now has been accessible only to scholars. As readers get their hands on this final work, writer Colin Grant takes the opportunity to look back at some of the gems in Hurston’s long and varied career.

 

Joanna Scutts on How We Find—and Lose—Women Writers

Exhumations and Revelations, from Zora Neale Hurston

to Bette Howland

JOANNA SCUTTS

May 13, 2019

How does a woman writer get lost—and found? Brigid Hughes’ story of rediscovering the Chicago writer Bette Howland follows a now-familiar path of chance encounter, pursuit, and recovery. A few years ago, on the dollar cart of a used bookstore, Hughes found a copy of Howland’s 1974 memoir W-3, spurring her to track down the author’s son, then uncover a trove of unpublished writing—selections of which she published in A Public Space, the literary journal she edits, in 2015. Now, the journal is launching a books division with a collection of Howland’s stories, Calm Sea and Prosperous Voyage, titled after the novella that’s a highlight of the book.