“Lillios says that she wanted to capture the relations between ‘the daughter of an Alabama slave . . . and a transplanted upper-middle-class Yankee,’ especially during the 1940s, ‘when both women were at the height of their literary creativity.’ And so she does, thoroughly and engagingly.”—Wall Street Journal
“Illuminates the complex artistic and personal connections between Hurston (1891–1960) and Rawlings (1896–1953). . . . Central to the discussion is Rawlings’s struggle with how to treat Hurston as a complete equal in the South.”—Choice
One of the twentieth century’s most intriguing and complicated literary friendships was that between Zora Neale Hurston and Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings. When they met in the early 1940s, both were at the height of their literary powers. Rawlings had already achieved wild success with her best-selling and Pulitzer Prize–winning novel, The Yearling, while Hurston had published Their Eyes Were Watching God to mostly positive reviews, although some critics attacked her use of a “minstrel technique.”
They shared a mutual admiration for each other’s writing and sensibilities. By all accounts theirs was a warm friendship. Yet at every turn, Rawlings’s own racism and the societal norms of the Jim Crow South loomed on the horizon, until her friendship with Hurston transformed Rawlings’s views on the subject and made her an advocate for racial equality.
Anna Lillios, associate professor of English at the University of Central Florida, is the editor of the Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings Journal of Florida Literature. She is the director of the Zora Neale Hurston Electronic Archive as well as executive director and trustee of the Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings Society.
