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4.4 AVERAGE
4.4 AVERAGE
I am a fan of Zora Neale Hurston especially after reading Their Eyes Were Watching God in the 11th grade. I am interested in who she was and why she wrote and this book gave me those answers. This book is well researched and well written. I enjoyed reading the stories of how she lived, the friends she made, and how she wrote. I also really enjoyed how the author integrated stories of the Harlem Renaissance and other black artist of that time to give a whole picture. It took me a really long time to finish this book but I'm glad I did.
Extensively researched, this biography paints the a beautiful portrait of the prolific 20th century author. I throughly enjoyed learning more about one of my favorite authors. Though she predates the phase, Zora was “black girl magic.”
I had this feeling that I was reading Zora's autobiography in someone else's words after I got through nine chapters. After looking at the end notes, I see Boyd paraphrased or quoted Hurston's Dust Tracks on a Road extensively as her main source. 😬
I don't think I'm ever going to 'finish' this one, but instead I'll keep it around forever as a reference and for inspiration on how to fight the man through sheer willfulness.
Hurston was a remarkable writer who imbued every word with her own lively, incandescent spirit. Would that one could say the same for Boyd. While her research is extraordinary, ( how I long to read all those unpublished essays she discovered!) she seems to feel obliged to include every last anecdote about Hurston's eating, smoking, clothing and housekeeping habits, which makes an otherwise fascinating story somewhat difficult to wade through. However, Hurston's unquenchable genius blazes across the pages, and one is left breathless at the scope and range of her intellect, and her towering self confidence. In a time when everything she did, said, and believed was considered either uppity by white racists, or low class by the elite "niggerati" of the black upper class, Zora remained cheerfully true to herself and to her small town black folk culture. Boyd does a masterful job of portraying Zora's persistence and and charm, which enabled her to conquer academia, high society and the literary world, despite the condescenion of her many inferiors.
informative
slow-paced
Zora Neale Hurston is my IDOL! She is the author of my favorite book and as an avid reader since the young age of five and reading any snd everything I could get my hands on, that is saying something. Having said that I am NOT a fan of non-fictional works. I find them positively boring and mostly likely never finish them. This book capitulated me from the beginning. Of course, Hurston being my favorite author I already knew the basics, but I loved reading about her early struggles as a writer. I loved reading about her time and part in the Harlem Renaissance. I loved reading about her contemporaries and her interactions with them. I was moved and I was saddened by the life and ending of this extraordinary woman who was never really given her flowers while she was here. It is heart-breaking.
I would recommend d this book to fans of Hurston and other Harlem Renaissance writers.
I would recommend d this book to fans of Hurston and other Harlem Renaissance writers.
When I decided to join #wlclub, I hadn't considered that books about rad women's whole lives would be...hefty. Valerie Boyd's narrative biography of Zora Neale Hurston is 433 pages deep (if you omit the 100+ pages of notes at the end)—and so full.
I learned something on every page, whether it was about ZNH, the Harlem Renaissance, hoodoo, racism, the editorial process, lying about age, collaboration, HBCUs, or being a woman of "great verve." I am forever going to think of her when I see the
I learned something on every page, whether it was about ZNH, the Harlem Renaissance, hoodoo, racism, the editorial process, lying about age, collaboration, HBCUs, or being a woman of "great verve." I am forever going to think of her when I see the
Valerlie Boyd's biographies of Zora Neale Hurston is one of the most well-written and comprehensive biography I've read in a long time. It is obvious that Boyd loves Hurston, both as an author and as a force for black civil rights. And yet this love does not move her to brush over the controversial aspects of Hurston's life. She very candidly discusses that fact that Hurston plagiarized one of her early anthropological works, that she shared much of the blame for her falling out with Langston Hughes, and that she could, at times, lean too far into the idea of pulling oneself up by one's bootstraps and ignoring the fact that most black southerners did not grow up somewhere like Eatonville, an all-black Floridian town where children were largely removed from the worst of the Jim Crow era. It also clears up what feels off about Hurston's memoir "Dust Tracks on the Road"--it was heavily edited to be palatable to a white audience during wartime and not as radical as her original text.
But what I loved most about this biography is that it dispels so many myths that surround Hurston's legacy. For instance, Boyd points out that Hurston did not live some kind of "rags-to-riches-to-rags" life, and she did not spend most of her final years as a domestic servant (though Hurston didn't seem particularly embarrassed or angry she worked as a maid in her later years). Hurston, like all of the Harlem Renaissance writers, were first and foremost displaced by a new generation of writers, a common enough occurrence. She wrote almost until the day she died and her works were read and beloved until then, even if she didn't die in a giant mansion or in luxury. Boyd sums it best as:
"Hurston has deeply influenced at least two generations of writers and readers of all colors and cultures. For these people--Zora's literary children and grandchildren--her legacy is not tragic. It is, to the contrary, one of the fierce Independence and literary excellence."
I strongly recommend this biography. It is a wonderful read.
But what I loved most about this biography is that it dispels so many myths that surround Hurston's legacy. For instance, Boyd points out that Hurston did not live some kind of "rags-to-riches-to-rags" life, and she did not spend most of her final years as a domestic servant (though Hurston didn't seem particularly embarrassed or angry she worked as a maid in her later years). Hurston, like all of the Harlem Renaissance writers, were first and foremost displaced by a new generation of writers, a common enough occurrence. She wrote almost until the day she died and her works were read and beloved until then, even if she didn't die in a giant mansion or in luxury. Boyd sums it best as:
"Hurston has deeply influenced at least two generations of writers and readers of all colors and cultures. For these people--Zora's literary children and grandchildren--her legacy is not tragic. It is, to the contrary, one of the fierce Independence and literary excellence."
I strongly recommend this biography. It is a wonderful read.