Zora Neale Hurston (Their Eyes Were Watching God) and Langston Hughes ("The Negro Speaks of Rivers", "Let America Be America Again") were collaborators, literary gadflies and close companions. They travelled together in Hurston's dilapidated car through the rural southern US collecting folklore, worked on the play Mule Bone and wrote scores of loving letters to each other. They even had the same patron: Charlotte Osgood Mason, a wealthy white woman who insisted on being called "Godmother".
Paying them lavishly while trying to control their work, Mason may have been the spark for their bitter falling-out. Yuval Taylor answers questions about their split while illuminating Hurston's and Hughes's lives, work, competitiveness and ambition.
Yuval Taylor, senior editor at Chicago Review Press, is the author of Zora and Langston: A Story of Friendship and Betrayal and coauthor of Darkest America: Black Minstrelsy from Slavery to Hip-Hop and Faking It: The Quest for Authenticity in Popular Music. He has edited three volumes of African American slave narratives, and his writings have appeared in The Antioch Review, The Guardian, and other publications. He lives in Chicago.