 Photo Credit: Robin Hultgren |
October 28 USC Professor of English Carla Kaplan (editor) discusses Zora Neale Hurston: A Life in Letters. A penetrating portrait of the life, writings, and impressive imagination of a woman at the heart of the Harlem Renaissance-- one of the most brilliant contributors to American 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.
Co-presented by Facing History & Ourselves. |