Zora and Langston

A Story of Friendship and Betrayal

By: Yuval Taylor

Narrated by: Bahni Turpin

Length: 8 hrs and 39 mins

Publisher's summary

Zora and Langston is the dramatic and moving story of one of the most influential friendships in literature.

They were best friends. They were collaborators, literary gadflies, and champions of the common people. They were the leading lights of the Harlem Renaissance. Zora Neale Hurston, the author of Their Eyes Were Watching God, and Langston Hughes, the author of "The Negro Speaks of Rivers" and "Let America Be America Again", first met in 1925, at a great gathering of black and white literati, and they fascinated each other. They traveled together in Hurston's dilapidated car through the rural South collecting folklore, worked on the play Mule Bone, and wrote scores of loving letters. 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 and passionate falling-out. Was the split inevitable when Hughes decided to be financially independent of his patron? Was Hurston jealous of the young woman employed as their typist? Or was the rupture over the authorship of Mule Bone? Yuval Taylor answers these questions while illuminating Hurston's and Hughes's lives, work, competitiveness, and ambition, uncovering little-known details.

©2019 Yuval Taylor (P)2019 HighBridge, a division of Recorded Books

Critic reviews

"Narrator Bahni Turpin engages the listener with this complex dual biography of writers Zora Neale Hurston and Langston Hughes.... Turpin keeps the pace of the work flowing even as she covers dense biographical background, as well as the development of African-American literary society of the time. Her pleasingly neutral tones for the narrative make the passages in which she voices the boisterous Hurston and the mercurial Hughes stand out in contrast." (AudioFile Magazine)

This was exactly what I was hoping it would be!

This was a very interesting tale of two friends who we now revere when we reflect on the Harlem renaissance and black writers. This story was behind the scenes, and stories I imagine you’d only know if you’d been there! Enjoyed the writing and the vocabulary!

Fascinating Story

I've always enjoyed the works of Hughes and Neale Hurston, especially Hurston after I was cast in an orginal play when I was 20 entitled "Zora", written by Bill Rodgers. I knew that both Zora and Langston were friends but never knew this close. This book gives an eye opening account into each of their lives both together and separate. You will learn so much about these to icons as well as many others they ran with in this time period.

Very interesting but insufficient.....

Needs more literary analysis for me. I understand the importance of friendship connections full of the love intrigues that shape lives. But I wanted more information about each writer's stylistic habits that were so influential to their professional styles and literary history.

Loved it!

I enjoyed this book, I finished it in one evening. I would have preferred another narrator, but the story waa very good.

Zora and Langston

The book was not what I thought it was it wasn’t interesting I was playing blah day boring boring boring would not recommend