Carla Kaplan, "Editing an Icon"
(page 2 of 7)

American literary tastes changed dramatically during Hurston's lifetime. And the dizzying ups and downs of her career, in part, reflect those changes in taste. Her letters reveal in sometimes painful detail, how hard these changes could be for her to negotiate.

[Alain] Locke wrote a one-paragraph review of Their Eyes Were Watching God, for example, that so enraged Hurston, despite the fact that he did call her talented and dubbed the novel "folklore fiction at its best"—a veiled compliment if ever there was one—that she never forgave him.

In an angry, unpublished response, she accused him of being a no-nothing show-off. And she offered to debate him on what he knows about Negroes and Negro life, any time.

To James Weldon Johnson she wrote that Locke was "a malicious, spiteful little snot."

Hurston was not just a great writer, playwright, essayist, dramatist, folklorist. She was one of the absolutely great American letter writers, writing in a form that was then at its height.

She wrote so many letters that at one point, when she came back after one brief trip to the Bahamas, she described returning to "79 pieces of mail waiting for me, on my return."

She described suitcases literally filled with correspondence. Mail that would take her weeks to slog through. Fortunately, she saved carbons of many of her replies, which can be found in the University of Florida archive. Equally fortunately, many of her correspondents knew what these letters were, and recognized both their literary and their historical value, and saved them.

With great foresight and often at the urging of Hurston's friend, Carl Van Vechten, who devoted many years to collecting and archiving African American materials, Hurston's letters were saved and donated to various archives. . . . There are well over 35 of them.

She wrote so many letters that sometimes I was able to find and identify five or six that she wrote on a given day. Some of those were laboriously typed, single-spaced, multi-page letters. So simply as a letter writer, she was sometimes writing 15 to 25 single-spaced pages of typewritten material a day.

And so, the letters form an extraordinary archive about her thoughts, about culture, about writing, about everything that was going on in her day—because she wrote so often.