Zora Neale Hurston: a Life in Letters.

Edited by Carla Kaplan Doubleday, October 2002 $40.00 ISBN 0-385-49035-6

Within days of having Zora Neale Hurston: A Life in Letters in my possession, I was inspired to devote the total of my lunch hour to selecting beautiful blank cards and stationary, a fine ink pen and a book of stamps. By the end of the day, I had penned six letters, the old-fashioned way, to friends and relatives--something I haven't done since summer camp. In our haste to save time, we check our in boxes with an eagerness that was once reserved for that moment before pushing a tiny silver key into a mailbox door. Email has replaced paper and pen, so much so that the U.S. Postal Service is losing business. But the truth of the matter is, folks will neither salvage nor cherish email as they might a handwritten letter.

And so A Life in Letters is a gift. It includes more than 500 letters and postcards written by Zora Neale Hurston over four decades. The 800-plus-page collection reveals more about this brilliant and complex woman than perhaps the entire body of her published works combined, including her notoriously unrevealing autobiography, Dust Tracks on the Road. Amazingly, the urgency and immediacy (typos and all) we associate with email can also be found in Zora's letters. She writes to a veritable who's who in American history and society, including Langston Hughes, Carl Van Vechten, Charlotte Osgood Mason, Franz Boas, Dorothy West and W.E.B. Du Bois among others, sometimes more than once or twice a day. In these, her most intimate writings, Zora comes to life.

While we are familiar with Zora the novelist, essayist, playwright and anthropologist, A Life in Letters introduces us to Zora the filmmaker; Zora the Barnard College undergrad and Columbia University student; Zora the two-time Guggenheim fellow; Zora the chicken specialist; Zora the thrice-married wife; and Zora the political pundit. Zora's letters are at times flip, ironic, heartbreaking and humorous. They are insightful, biting and candid as journal entries. One can only wish for responses to Zora's words, but the work is not incomplete without them.

A treasure trove of information, in addition to the annotated letters, a chronology of Zora's life, a glossary of the people, events and institutions to which she refers in her letters, and a thorough bibliographical listing are generously included by editor Carla Kaplan. Each decade of writing is introduced by an essay on the social, political and personal points of significance in Zora's life. Kaplan's is a fine, well-edited and utterly revealing work of scholarship into the life of one of the greatest and often most misunderstood American writers. In many ways, A Life in Letters is, in fact, a long love letter for Zora. It is a reminder to salvage and cherish what should not be forgotten and an admonishment to write what you love on paper.

--Zakia Carter is an editor at Africana.com.