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lewismillholland 's review for:
Wrapped in Rainbows: The Life of Zora Neale Hurston
by Valerie Boyd
It's not every day that a white man writes a disparaging review of a biography about a seminal black author written by another black woman. That's likely because white men don't read books about black women to start with, and that's the most charitable thing I can say in defense of Lewis Millholland's trash review of Valerie Boyd's "Wrapped in Rainbows," the story of Zora Neale Hurston.
The review kicks off deceptively woke, acknowledging that American society grants no value to women after they pass their child-rearing years. "There's no better example of this than Zora Neale Hurston," Millholland writes. "Hurston blasted onto the literary scene in 1934 with 'Jonah's Gourde Vine' and just three years later produced 'Their Eyes Were Watching God.' But then, as the years rolled into the forties, and Zora's voice came through confused, exhausted, there wasn't anything left for her to offer the world. Zora'd gone the way of all women in society -- forgotten."
Even leaving aside *Moses, Man of the Mountain* and her coverage of the Ruby McCollum trial for the *Pittsburgh Courier*, Millholland's assessment that Zora was "forgotten" after 1940 is, at best, ignorance, and at worst malicious sexism. It makes a reader wonder if Millholland finished the book, considering Boyd devotes several pages to this concept of "writing burnout." It happens to all writers as they age, men and women. Hemingway was Boyd's vivid example who, despite a swan song in the form of *Old Man and the Sea*, recognized he had nothing left to write and shot himself in Ketchum, Idaho.
Millholland does flag a poignant observation on black Americans, though. Fresh off the Pulitzer Prize-winning "Fredrick Douglass: Prophet of Freedom," he asks why historical black figures are fundamentally *good* people. Other than affairs and lackluster parenting, famous black Americans aren't assholes. There's not black Hemingway gaslighting F. Scott Fitzgerald into questioning his marriage after the man's wife refused to sleep with him, no black Bob Dylan ejecting friends out of his limo into the Manhattan winter. Is it because biographers are more defensive of their subject's morality if they're black -- or "handling them with kids' gloves," as Millholland put it -- or is basic decency a requirement for blacks in a way it doesn't to whites? If you're black in America, do you have to have a knack for keeping the peace if you want to progress at all?
Of course, Millholland scraps this line of thought in its infancy, preferring to turn back into criticizing "Wrapped in Rainbows." He calls it "the truest biography I've read, since seventy percent of it is a third-person narrative and not a slice of history told through a noteworthy subject." Other than Zora's influence on the Harlem Renaissance and sporadic bursts into the national literature scene, Millholland argues, the book is the tale of a single black women trying to make ends meet in the pre-civil rights era. "It's a powerful story," he concedes, "but it's not history."
Again, the question arises: did Millholland read the book? Hurston's influence on writers including Langston Hughes continued throughout her life, and her contributions to anthropological discoveries across America and the Caribbean were, in her own time, unparalleled. The popular conception of "hoodoo" was thrown on its head as a direct result of her findings. To write Hurston out of history because her novels weren't winning awards is a shaky argument. I give his review a zero out of five stars.
The review kicks off deceptively woke, acknowledging that American society grants no value to women after they pass their child-rearing years. "There's no better example of this than Zora Neale Hurston," Millholland writes. "Hurston blasted onto the literary scene in 1934 with 'Jonah's Gourde Vine' and just three years later produced 'Their Eyes Were Watching God.' But then, as the years rolled into the forties, and Zora's voice came through confused, exhausted, there wasn't anything left for her to offer the world. Zora'd gone the way of all women in society -- forgotten."
Even leaving aside *Moses, Man of the Mountain* and her coverage of the Ruby McCollum trial for the *Pittsburgh Courier*, Millholland's assessment that Zora was "forgotten" after 1940 is, at best, ignorance, and at worst malicious sexism. It makes a reader wonder if Millholland finished the book, considering Boyd devotes several pages to this concept of "writing burnout." It happens to all writers as they age, men and women. Hemingway was Boyd's vivid example who, despite a swan song in the form of *Old Man and the Sea*, recognized he had nothing left to write and shot himself in Ketchum, Idaho.
Millholland does flag a poignant observation on black Americans, though. Fresh off the Pulitzer Prize-winning "Fredrick Douglass: Prophet of Freedom," he asks why historical black figures are fundamentally *good* people. Other than affairs and lackluster parenting, famous black Americans aren't assholes. There's not black Hemingway gaslighting F. Scott Fitzgerald into questioning his marriage after the man's wife refused to sleep with him, no black Bob Dylan ejecting friends out of his limo into the Manhattan winter. Is it because biographers are more defensive of their subject's morality if they're black -- or "handling them with kids' gloves," as Millholland put it -- or is basic decency a requirement for blacks in a way it doesn't to whites? If you're black in America, do you have to have a knack for keeping the peace if you want to progress at all?
Of course, Millholland scraps this line of thought in its infancy, preferring to turn back into criticizing "Wrapped in Rainbows." He calls it "the truest biography I've read, since seventy percent of it is a third-person narrative and not a slice of history told through a noteworthy subject." Other than Zora's influence on the Harlem Renaissance and sporadic bursts into the national literature scene, Millholland argues, the book is the tale of a single black women trying to make ends meet in the pre-civil rights era. "It's a powerful story," he concedes, "but it's not history."
Again, the question arises: did Millholland read the book? Hurston's influence on writers including Langston Hughes continued throughout her life, and her contributions to anthropological discoveries across America and the Caribbean were, in her own time, unparalleled. The popular conception of "hoodoo" was thrown on its head as a direct result of her findings. To write Hurston out of history because her novels weren't winning awards is a shaky argument. I give his review a zero out of five stars.