English Scholar Turns Investigative Historian to Reveal Hurston’s Life
By Nicole St.Pierre
USC College English professor Carla Kaplan has spent the last seven years as an investigative historian. She has traveled around the country and combed through countless library archives in her quest to reconstruct the biography of Zora Neale Hurston, the most published African-American female writer of her time, who died penniless and a complete mystery, even to those who thought they knew her.
“Zora Neale Hurston: A Life in Letters” is the first edited collection of letters by a black female author, lending much-needed insight into the questions that surround Hurston’s elusive life. When asked how she feels to be the editor of such a historical collection, Kaplan breathes a sigh of relief and says, “Glad it’s respected and happy it’s over.”
In the past few months, Kaplan’s 800-page collection of letters has been called a “portable archive” by the New York Times book section, where it appeared on the front page; has earned rave reviews by the Los Angeles Times and O, The Oprah Magazine; and has climbed to the top of book club lists across America.
Hurston, a known folklorist, anthropologist, essayist and playwright during the 1930s, has fascinated people since she was rediscovered as part of the Harlem Renaissance. Author of the well-known 1937 book “Their Eyes Were Watching God,” Hurston was the first to write about a black woman’s life from the inside out.
“Hurston is extremely complex and simply remarkable,” says Kaplan, who first stumbled across one of Hurston’s letters while finishing her doctoral dissertation and teaching at Yale University. The feminist movement of the 1970s reclaimed dozens of lost female writers, Hurston among them. But there was no chronological order to the many fascinating events of Hurston’s life. “I kept thinking, it is really important for someone to organize her letters,” says Kaplan, “but I never thought that someone would be me.”
When she decided to write the book, Kaplan faced numerous challenges. First, she wanted to edit a volume that would be respected in scholarly circles. She also wanted it to be widely available and interesting to a general audience—a historically difficult combination.
Since Hurston died without a will, her intellectual property was split up among eight people. To gain permission to use the letters, Kaplan spent two years contacting the scattered heirs of Hurston’s estate.
Then, what started as 150 letters to organize and footnote ballooned into more than 600 as Kaplan spoke to countless historians and interviewed generations of people who were in some way associated with Hurston.
“Every day uncovered something new. I would realize: Hey, she not only ran with Langston Hughes, she also knew Winston Churchill—well I’ll be darned,” says Kaplan.
That chameleon-like persona was a trait that created another great challenge for Kaplan. This infinitely inventive writer had no trouble posing as different things to different people. She lied about her age and birthplace (including to her three husbands), hid 10 years of her life and communicated differently depending on whether her audience was black Southern farmers or the white upper class.
At one point, when Kaplan had 600 letters spread out in front of her, many of them not dated, it hit home. “To put them in order I was going to have to trade in my English professor hat for my investigative historian hat,” she jokes.
But the biggest challenge of the project was having to footnote the thousands of references that appeared throughout the letters.
“The whole project was like a puzzle that once I started piecing together, got larger than I—or anyone else, I think—ever imagined,” she says. “If I knew what I was getting myself into when I started, I may not have done this.”
Kaplan did take a brief break from the book, for about six months, to edit another of Hurston’s works, “Every Tongue Got to Confess: Negro Folktales From the Gulf States.” It is a book of black Southern folktales from the 1920s that languished for 30 years in the basements of Columbia University, the National Archives and the Smithsonian.
“In many ways, my work on Hurston is the least complete of my life because there is still so much more out there, but it is definitely the work I am most satisfied with. I feel like I have done honor to an extremely complicated life, without sentimentalizing it.”
Judging by the pile of positive book reviews on Kaplan’s desk, it seems that others agree.
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