How did Langston Hughes and Zora Neale Hurston become friends? For Longreads, Yuval Taylor tells the story of a fortuitous road trip, on which Hurston drove Hughes from Mobile to Tuskegee in her Nash coupe. “The road trip provided the perfect opportunity for Zora and Langston to compare notes from their Southern travels, exchange ideas, and explore, along the back roads, the characteristics of African American culture that informed their greatest work,” writes Taylor. “They had both kept meticulous records of songs, sayings, turns of phrase; they related their impressions of conjure wisdom, including the names of potions and powders; they delighted in the cultural riches of their Southern black brethren.” And thus, one of the great literary friendships was born.
On the Road with Hurston and Hughes
Russell Hoban Dies at 86
Russell Hoban, a prolific author who created Frances, a girl who appeared in the guise of a badger in seven books for children (Bedtime was always my favorite), died on Tuesday in London. He was 86.
The Door to Another World
Recommended Reading: A new short story by Whiting Award-winner Alice Sola Kim.
From the Mixed Up Files of DFW
Newsweek takes an “infinitely fascinating quest” through David Foster Wallace’s just-released archive at University of Texas’ Harry Ransom Center.
Rumpus Book Club Action
At The Rumpus, a long group interview/discussion with John Brandon, author of Citrus County. It’s all part of The Rumpus Book Club
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Miles to Go before I Sleep
Our own Nick Ripatrazone writes for The Atlantic about the tradition of writers who love to run, from Haruki Murakami to Joyce Carol Oates. Pair with Ripatrazone’s Millions essay on writing as training.
Building Covers
Year in Reading alumnus Chris Ware drew the cover of this week’s New Yorker. (If you liked his latest, Building Stories, you might like reading our review.)
Tuesday New Release Day: Bezmozgis; Pratchett; Simpson; McCabe; Oliver; Moran
Out this week: The Betrayers by David Bezmozgis; A Slip of the Keyboard: Collected Nonfiction by Terry Pratchett; Ballroom by Alice Simpson; Hello Mr. Bones & Goodbye Mr. Rat by Patrick McCabe; Rooms by Lauren Oliver; and How to Build a Girl by Caitlin Moran, who released an essay collection two years ago. For more on these and other new titles, check out our Great Second-half 2014 Book Preview.
Both Hughes and Hurston traded shamelessly in the popular Negro-denigrating stereotypes of the era, a cynical practise that resulted in the fact that they were promoted by the condescending white literary establishment then… and still are now.
As I commented on a story by Hughes first published by Esquire, in 1936, and re-published, uncritically (with relish, even) in 2019:
“The main characters in this story are low-grade morons. Does that make them ‘authentic’? Reminding me of the famous set piece in Hurston’s “Their Eyes Were Watching God” in which two very Black gentleman have an argument about whether the Esso (brand name filling station) dinosaur logo is an actual living thing (kept out behind the filling station) and from ‘Egypt’. Ho ho, ha ha (those quaint Negroes)… but who cares? Hurston is an icon. Hughes is an icon. Did either produce hilarious literary vignettes of moronic Whites? I somehow doubt it, as each knew which side of the day-old toast the dirty butter (or pomade) was on. Who was in charge of the Literary Filter that this, and so many other Jim Crow Fantasias, pumped through at such volume that it all filled the trough of the ‘canon’ of Black Lit? Imagine ‘Beloved Classics of Jewish Lit’ commissioned, edited, published in Germany and taught in German Universities the same year this story was published (1936). Such a canon couldn’t be any more grotesque.
“Sure, I know, Hughes and Hurston and every other member of the Black Kapo Class very famously advertised their ‘love of the Negro Race’ and worked to ‘uplift’ same. But those public sentiments merely satisfied the conditions of their Kapo contracts with the Dominant Culture; they were terribly divided people (I think I just heard Michael Jackson grab his crotch).”
Well, again, there were always very few routes, to mainstream acceptance, open to Artists of (too much) Color, which didn’t involve wearing a conceptual banana-skirt… I get that. But where did all the self-aware push-back, from Black critics of the ’60s and ’70s, go? Kicked back out to the edge of the plantation during the ’80s?