Zora Neale Hurston: with a half dozen new books, the literary world reexamines this enigmatic writer's life's work. (tribute).

Every so often, literary scholars seem to want to dissect an author's body of work, hoping to gain some insight into their personal life. It's a kind of backend approach to biographical research that assumes literary figures are somehow revealed in their characters and story lines. The equivalent of literary psychoanalysis, at times it's a convenient way to divine a writer's thinking. But there are always exceptions.

What does Invisible Man say about Ralph Ellison? Or Beloved and Song of Solomon say about Toni Morrison? Maybe nothing. Maybe everything.

Inevitably, any writer worth their salt is subject to a rigorous deconstruction, not just of their work but of their personal lives. Whether or not that scrutiny is illuminating depends on the biographer and the reader. In the case of Zora Neale Hurston--whose life is explored in several new books being released this year--she will probably remain something of an enigma despite the best efforts to understand her and her work. Yet there's always that temptation.

Among Hurston's early biographers a few have fixated on her age--whether she was born in 1891 or in 1901, as Hurston subscribes--uncomfortable with the slippery slope that surrounds not only the year of her birth but where she was born.

In Pamela Bordelon's biographical essay that accompanies Go Gator and Muddy the Water, an apt title for Hurston's collection of writings from the Depression era Federal Writers' Project, the issue of Zora's age and her childhood seem to confound the biographer. She writes, "Zora Neale Hurston has proved herself to be one of the most illusory figures in American letters. She opens her autobiographical Dust Tracks on a Road (1942) with the admonition that she is writing it because `you will have to know something about the time and place where I came from, in order that you may interpret the incidents and directions of my life.'" Later, Bordelon admonishes the writer saying, "In fact, Hurston was born in Alabama, not Florida, in 1891, ten years before she occasionally claimed."

But while the inaccuracies noted by Bordelon are considerable, they say little about this maverick of the Harlem Renaissance. Ironically, it is precisely those questions raised by the biographer that are answered in Hurston's fiction, almost as if she anticipated the controversy.

In Their Eyes Were Watching God, Hurston's character Pheoby Watson says to a group of women gossiping about Janie: "You mean, you mad `cause she didn't stop and tell us all her business; Anyhow, what you ever know her to do so bad as y'all make out? The worst thing Ah ever knowed her to do was taking a few years offa her age and dat ain't never harmed nobody."

Hurston reveals more of herself through her fiction, perhaps, than in her autobiography. In Robert E. Hemenway's 1980 account, Zora Neale Hurston: A Literary Biography, he observes of her first short story published in Opportunity magazine: "`Drenched in Light' was Hurston's calling card on literary New York, the tangible evidence she could point to that she was indeed a serious writer. It was also a statement of personal identity," he writes. "... The point is that Isie [Watts], poor and black, is far from tragic; rather, she is "drenched in light...."

Among the crop of new books this year that will delve into Hurston's life and work are some notable biographies and collections. Other works by the author are available, though sometimes hard to find. Those enjoying renewed interest from readers include Mules and Men (HarperCollins, reissued March 1990, $13.95, ISBN 0-060-91648-6), Spunk: The Selected Stories of Zora Neale Hurston (Marlowe & Co., reissued December 1997, $10.95, ISBN 1-569-24743-9) and Tell My Horse: Voodoo and Life in Haiti and Jamaica (HarperCollins, reissued February 1990, $13.50, ISBN 0-060-91649-4), among others.

This spring, a collection of Hurston's letters dating from the mid-1920s to the 1950s that includes her correspondence with Langston Hughes, Dorothy West, Alain Locke, Carl Sandburg, Franz Boas, W.E.B. Du Bois, Countee Cullen and Carl Van Vechten, among others is being published. Edited by Carla Kaplan Zora Neale Hurston: A Life in Letters (Doubleday, May 2002, $35, ISBN 0-385-49035-6) details the writer's desperate efforts to revive her career near its end, and the extensive anthropological research she did while traveling throughout Florida and the Caribbean, which was the basis for much of the dialect and folklore in her writing. Kaplan also edited Every Tongue Got To Confess: Negro Folk-Tales From the Gulf States (HarperCollins, November 2001, $25, ISBN 0-060-18893-6), which included Hurston's writings from the Federal Writers' Project.

The Collected Essays by Zora Neale Hurston (HarperCollins, February 2002, $12.95, ISBN 0-060-92172-2) is being released just in time for Black History Month. And in April, Women, Violence, and Testimony in the Works of Zora Neale Hurston: African-American Literature and Culture, Volume 3 by Diana Miles (Peter Lang Publishing, April 2002, ISBN 0-820-45751-5) is also being published. In August, Valerie Boyd's much anticipated Wrapped in Rainbows, a biography of Zora Neale Hurston from Scribner, is being published.

Depending on the authority, all of the new 2001 books will commemorate either the 101st or 111th year since Hurston's birth.

Two more after 2002 ...

The Zora Neale Hurston lovefest continues with at least two new books of her work slated for release after this year:

Complete Plays by Zora Neale Hurston
September 2003, $12,95
Harperperennial Library,
ISBN 0-060-92169-2

Barracoon
by Zora Neale Hurston
October 2004, $9.95 (paper)
HarperCollins, ISBN 0-060-92170-6

Evette Porter writes this month's "Tribute" (page 12) on Zora Neale Hurston, who is undergoing yet another literary revival. One of the most influential writers of the 20th century, Hurston inspired countless contemporary black and feminist writers. But for many, she is remembered for her skillful storytelling and vivid characters that make novels like Their Eyes Were Watching God the kind you read in one sitting. A former editor at Essence, the Village Voice, and most recently at Crain's New York Business, Evette Porter takes over as BIBR's new executive editor.