A valuable resource for students of Hurston’s work, and a mine for future research.
Revealing selection of letters by the renowned folklorist, novelist, and essayist, capably edited by Kaplan (English/USC).
Hurston (1891–1960) was one of the most prominent African-American writers of the 1920s and ’30s, a confidante and peer of Langston Hughes, Ruth Benedict, Carl Van Vechten, Franz Boas, Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings, and other important intellectuals of the time. Her star fell in the ’50s, and she died in obscurity in a Florida welfare home. Rediscovered in the 1980s, her work, especially the memoir Dust Tracks on the Road (1942) and the novel Their Eyes Were Watching God (1936), is now a fixture in college courses on African-American literature, women’s studies, and folklore. Her letters add depth to Hurston’s self-portraits elsewhere, revealing her to be a complex, sometimes unpleasant figure. Of particular interest to literary scholars are: Hurston’s relationship with wealthy patron Charlotte Osgood Mason, who apparently expected a kind of fawning devotion in return for her largesse (the writer addresses her throughout as “darling godmother”); her sometimes prickly interactions with the artists of the Harlem Renaissance; and the rightward drift of her political beliefs, which, Kaplan allows, “have often baffled her admirers.” General readers may find Hurston’s broad entrepreneurial streak more compelling: at points, for instance, she importunes Langston Hughes to invest in property near her Florida home (“I can, if I choose sell to any of my friends so long as they belong to my social caste. They want no niggers in that neighborhood . . . [but] were agreeably surprised in me”) and seeks funds from Mason to develop a catering business (“I’d like you for my first client, and if I please you then I’ll write personal letters to some of the finer hostesses and try to establish myself as New York’s Chicken Specialist”).
A valuable resource for students of Hurston’s work, and a mine for future research.Pub Date: Oct. 1, 2002
ISBN: 0-385-49035-6
Page Count: 864
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2002
BOOK REVIEW
This is not the Nutcracker sweet, as passed on by Tchaikovsky and Marius Petipa. No, this is the original Hoffmann tale of 1816, in which the froth of Christmas revelry occasionally parts to let the dark underside of childhood fantasies and fears peek through. The boundaries between dream and reality fade, just as Godfather Drosselmeier, the Nutcracker's creator, is seen as alternately sinister and jolly. And Italian artist Roberto Innocenti gives an errily realistic air to Marie's dreams, in richly detailed illustrations touched by a mysterious light. A beautiful version of this classic tale, which will captivate adults and children alike. (Nutcracker; $35.00; Oct. 28, 1996; 136 pp.; 0-15-100227-4)
Pub Date: Oct. 28, 1996
ISBN: 0-15-100227-4
Page Count: 136
Publisher: Harcourt
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 1996
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
Stricter than, say, Bergen Evans or W3 ("disinterested" means impartial — period), Strunk is in the last analysis...
Privately published by Strunk of Cornell in 1918 and revised by his student E. B. White in 1959, that "little book" is back again with more White updatings.
Stricter than, say, Bergen Evans or W3 ("disinterested" means impartial — period), Strunk is in the last analysis (whoops — "A bankrupt expression") a unique guide (which means "without like or equal").Pub Date: May 15, 1972
ISBN: 0205632645
Page Count: 105
Publisher: Macmillan
Review Posted Online: Oct. 28, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 1972
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