carla kaplan

A Women’s History Month Profile: Zora Neale Hurston

Carla Kaplan, editor of Zora Neale Hurston: A Life in Letters, talks about the novelist, anthropologist, playwright, folklorist, essayist and poet

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March 28th, 2022

Revisiting Zora Neale Hurston

January 7 marked the 125th birthday of Zora Neale Hurston, a towering literary figure of the Harlem Renaissance whose best known published book is Their Eyes Were Watching God, a 1937 work that Time Magazine lists among the 100 best English-language novels published since 1923. Controversial at one time due to the strength of the black female protagonist’s character (resulting in the book actually being out of print for nearly thirty years), it is now considered essential reading in the study of African-American letters.

In addition to her work as a novelist, Hurston was a folklorist who studied the African-American culture of the rural South. During my 2002 interview with Carla Kaplan, author of Zora Neale Hurston: A Life in Letters, she describes Hurston as a

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January 9th, 2016

Carla Kaplan, editor of Zora Neale Hurston: A Life in Letters

Alice Walker’s 1975 Ms. magazine article “Looking for Zora” and Robert Hemenway’s 1977 biography reintroduced Zora Neale Hurston to the American landscape and ushered in a renaissance for a writer who was a bestselling author at her peak in the 1930’s, but died penniless and in obscurity some three decades later.

Since that rediscovery of novelist, anthropologist, playwright, folklorist, essayist and poet Hurston, her books — from the classic love story Their Eyes Were Watching God to her controversial autobiography, Dust Tracks on a Road — have sold millions of copies. Hurston is now taught in American, African American, and Women’s Studies courses in high schools and universities from coast to coast.

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December 10th, 2002