A fresh look at two important writers of the 1920s.
The tale of a famous literary friendship that ended in bitterness.
Zora Neale Hurston (1891-1960) and Langston Hughes (1901-1967) were major figures of the Harlem Renaissance and, for several years, collaborators and loving friends. Taylor (co-author: Darkest America: Black Minstrelsy from Slavery to Hip-Hop, 2012, etc.), senior editor at the Chicago Review Press, places their friendship at the center of a revealing examination of the alliances, betrayals, rivalries, and aspirations that characterized the African-American literary and arts world in the 1920s and beyond. In 1926, Hurston bestowed the nickname “Niggerati” on the many young writers and artists, “opposed to the literary conventions of the older generation of the black elite,” who gathered in Manhattan for social and literary activities. They were supported—sometimes with publicity, sometimes financially—by admiring white New Yorkers Hurston called “Negrotarians,” including Carl Van Vechten, Hart Crane, Muriel Draper, Max Eastman, Eugene O’Neill, George Gershwin, and H.L. Mencken. Foremost among them was Charlotte Mason, an heiress who inherited her husband’s vast wealth after his death in 1905. Among her passions were parapsychology, psychic healing, and African-Americans and Indians, who she believed were unsullied by “the ills of civilization” and possessed of “primitive creativity and spirituality [that] would energize and renew America.” A major collector of African art, she disdained white culture, declaring herself “eternally black.” In 1927, she decided to become a personal patron to many figures of the Niggerati. She must be called Godmother, she insisted, and demanded nothing less than complete filial devotion in exchange for monthly stipends of $150 (for Hughes) and $200 (for Hurston) to allow them to pursue their work. Mason, Taylor writes, was “a jealous god, controlling and wrathful,” dictating what kind of projects her “children” pursued and, in Hurston’s case, prohibiting her from showing her writing to anyone without Mason’s consent. Drawing on published and archival sources, Taylor creates a perceptive portrait of the bizarre patron and of the Hurston-Hughes friendship.
A fresh look at two important writers of the 1920s.Pub Date: March 26, 2019
ISBN: 978-0-393-24391-8
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Norton
Review Posted Online: Dec. 8, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2019
BOOK REVIEW
The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the...
Elie Wiesel spent his early years in a small Transylvanian town as one of four children.
He was the only one of the family to survive what Francois Maurois, in his introduction, calls the "human holocaust" of the persecution of the Jews, which began with the restrictions, the singularization of the yellow star, the enclosure within the ghetto, and went on to the mass deportations to the ovens of Auschwitz and Buchenwald. There are unforgettable and horrifying scenes here in this spare and sombre memoir of this experience of the hanging of a child, of his first farewell with his father who leaves him an inheritance of a knife and a spoon, and of his last goodbye at Buchenwald his father's corpse is already cold let alone the long months of survival under unconscionable conditions.
Pub Date: Jan. 16, 2006
ISBN: 0374500010
Page Count: 120
Publisher: Hill & Wang
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2006
A wonderful page-turner written with humility, immediacy, and great style. Nothing came cheap and easy to McCandless, nor...
The excruciating story of a young man on a quest for knowledge and experience, a search that eventually cooked his goose, told with the flair of a seasoned investigative reporter by Outside magazine contributing editor Krakauer (Eiger Dreams, 1990).
Chris McCandless loved the road, the unadorned life, the Tolstoyan call to asceticism. After graduating college, he took off on another of his long destinationless journeys, this time cutting all contact with his family and changing his name to Alex Supertramp. He was a gent of strong opinions, and he shared them with those he met: "You must lose your inclination for monotonous security and adopt a helter-skelter style of life''; "be nomadic.'' Ultimately, in 1992, his terms got him into mortal trouble when he ran up against something—the Alaskan wild—that didn't give a hoot about Supertramp's worldview; his decomposed corpse was found 16 weeks after he entered the bush. Many people felt McCandless was just a hubris-laden jerk with a death wish (he had discarded his map before going into the wild and brought no food but a bag of rice). Krakauer thought not. Admitting an interest that bordered on obsession, he dug deep into McCandless's life. He found a willful, reckless, moody boyhood; an ugly little secret that sundered the relationship between father and son; a moral absolutism that agitated the young man's soul and drove him to extremes; but he was no more a nutcase than other pilgrims. Writing in supple, electric prose, Krakauer tries to make sense of McCandless (while scrupulously avoiding off-the-rack psychoanalysis): his risky behavior and the rites associated with it, his asceticism, his love of wide open spaces, the flights of his soul.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1996
ISBN: 0-679-42850-X
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Villard
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 1995
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