On occasion, the two met up during their travels.
In 1927 they met in Alabama, posed for a picture
with Jessie Fauset at Tuskegee Institute in front of
a statue of BOOKERT. WASHINGTON, and then
drove back to New York City in “Sassy Susie,”
Hurston’s car. That year, they collaborated on a
musical production entitled Great Day. They
cowrote MULEBONE:A COMEDY OFNEGROLIFE
INTHREEACTS.The relationship was strained by
Hurston’s radical revisions of the work, her anxiety
about Hughes’s efforts to include and to share
profits with their secretary, LOUISE THOMPSON,
and Hurston’s independent presentation to pub-
lishers and others, without Hughes’s knowledge, of
her single-author version. Hughes was alarmed
when he received news of the play’s distribution
and potential production without his authoriza-
tion. In a January 1931 letter to friend CARLVAN
VECHTEN, he admitted that he was “not at all
angry about her actions, because she always has
been strange in lots of ways.” He continued, admit-
ting “I do hate to see a good Folk-play go to waste,
because for some reason I do not know, she no
longer wants to work with me.” In 1991, 60 years
after its completion, the work was staged on
BROADWAY.
Hurston developed several productive, though
demanding, relationships with patrons and men-
tors. Her supporters included rich and powerful
benefactresses such as Annie Nathan Meyer,
founder of Barnard College; Fannie Hurst, writer;
the writer, critic, and society figure Carl Van
Vechten; and Charlotte Osgood Mason, philan-
thropist and patron of several Harlem Renaissance
figures. The publishing house of J. B. LIPPINCOTT
produced all but one of her seven books. Based in
PHILADELPHIA, the firm relocated to New York City
and was, during its relationship with Hurston, one
of the nation’s leading publishers of trade books.
Her relationships with contemporary writers
were intense. An outspoken and unapologetic fig-
ure, Hurston was a generous role model for young
writers like Helene Johnson and Dorothy West.
COUNTEECULLEN, with whom she corresponded,
often encouraged her, and she in turn provided
supportive critiques of his work. Of his debut vol-
ume entitled COLOR,she insisted that it was “a won-
derful volume of poems” and told him “I just sit
and wonder as I read poem after poem and wonder
how you can keep it up so long, I can understand
one hitting off a few like that,” she marveled, “but
I cannot see where it all comes from!” (Kaplan,
84). Wallace Thurman, with whom she collabo-
rated on Fire!!,noted in an expansive 1932 letter
to Langston Hughes about a number of Harlem
Renaissance artists that “Zora should learn crafts-
manship and surprise the world and outstrip her
contemporaries as well” (Davis, 346). Yet, Hurston
did not hesitate to voice her frustration with what
she deemed tiresome portraits of African-Ameri-
can life. In response to what she called “me and
may honey got two mo’ days tuh do de buck”
poems that Langston Hughes was writing in the
mid 1920s, she found it hard to “refrain from
speaking” and decided that she was “at least going
to speak to Van Vechten,” Hughes’s close friend
and mentor, about the need for Hughes to develop
a more expansive creative and socially conscious
repertoire. Hurston also made time to craft profes-
sional and public responses to the works of her
peers. She published reviews, including a frank as-
sessment of Claude McKay’s HARLEM: NEGRO
METROPOLIS(1940) in which she noted that the
BOOK-OF-THE-MONTH CLUB alternate selection
confirmed that McKay “knows what is really hap-
pening among the folks,” that he had “done an
amazing thing... been absolutely frank... [and]
had spoken out about those things Negroes utter
only when they are breast to breast, but by tradi-
tion are forbidden to break a breath about when
white ears are present” (Cooper, 344–345).
Hurston’s lives as a scholar and novelist were
intertwined thoroughly throughout her life. She
wrote THEIREYESWEREWATCHINGGOD(1937),
her most popular novel, while she was in HAITI
conducting anthropological research. One year
later, she published Tell My Horse,the book based
on that research in the Caribbean. Hurston’s mete-
oric rise in Harlem circles coincided with her steady
development as an anthropologist who would soon
receive prestigious fellowships to fund her research.
Hurston published JONAH’SGOURDVINE,her first
novel, in 1934. It was followed by Their Eyes Were
Watching God(1937), MOSES,MAN OF THEMOUN-
TAIN(1939), and Seraph on the Suwanee(1948).
Her anthropological studies, funded by two
GUGGENHEIMFELLOWSHIPS, focused on cultural
practices in Jamaica and Haiti. Tell My Horse264 Hurston, Zora Neale