Zora and Langston
A Story of Friendship and Betrayal
21 August 2020
Description
Zora Neale Hurston and Langston Hughes, two giants of the Harlem Renaissance, were best friends—until they weren’t.
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.
Reviews
"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
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