Kansas University's chancellor is the respected biographer of Harlem Renaissance writer Zora Neale Hurston.
Journal-World Arts Editor
Nearly 30 years ago, Robert Hemenway read the book "Their Eyes Were Watching God" -- and before long he had packed his bags, bought a pickup camper and was crisscrossing the United States to dig up the truth about the book's author, Zora Neale Hurston.
"I thought, 'This is a a fantastic novel'," Hemenway, now chancellor at Kansas University, said, recalling the first time he read Hurston's book. "I wanted to learn more about the person who wrote it."
What he discovered was contradiction. Some researchers said Hurston had been married once; others said twice or not at all. Some biographers swore the writer and folklorist was from Florida; others said New York.
"There was mass confusion about the biographical facts about this writer, and that intrigued me," Hemenway said. "I decided to write a book and get the true facts."
With a National Endowment for the Humanities grant funding his research, Hemenway set out in 1970 to explore the places where Hurston had lived and talk to the people Hurston had known.
He went from Key West, Fla., to White Sulphur Springs, Mont., to New Haven, Conn., in search of tidbits about the Harlem Renaissance writer of the 1930s. He parked his camper in a Yale University lot for six weeks so he could immerse himself in the books at its Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library.
A second NEH grant in 1974 allowed him to do research at the Folklore Institute at Indiana University. Travel grants from the University of Wyoming and the University of Kentucky allowed him to stop writing for a while so he could track down new leads.
By 1977, Hemenway had found most of the answers to his questions, and the book -- "Zora Neale Hurston: A Literary Biography" -- was completed. Today the biography is considered an academic best-seller.
"Bob Hemenway is the author of the standard biography of Zora Neale Hurston," said Bill Andrews, director of the Hall Center for the Humanities. "When he started doing his research, she had been largely forgotten. Interest in her work has been developed over the last 20 years. ... His book has been praised for its scholarship and literary interpretation, and it's a pivotal book in black women's studies."
Hemenway's book also had a profound impact on author Alice Walker, who later wrote in its foreword:
"Robert Hemenway was the first critic I had read who seemed indignant that Zora's life ended in poverty and obscurity, that her last days were spent in a welfare home, and that her burial was paid for by 'subscription;' though Zora herself -- as he is careful to point out in this book -- remained gallant and unbowed until the end."
It was Hemenway's efforts to define Hurston's legacy and his exploration of Hurston's life that led Walker in 1973 to an overgrown Fort Pierce, Fla., graveyard, where she located and marked Hurston's grave.
"Although by that time I considered her a native American genius, there was nothing grand or historic in my mind," Walker wrote about that day. "It was, rather, a duty I accepted as naturally mine -- as a black person, a woman, and a writer -- because Zora was dead and I, for the time being, was alive."
Hemenway said what intrigued him most about Hurston -- a rural Florida native who briefly married twice, wrote seven books, maintained a long friendship with poet Langston Hughes and traveled the South collecting massive amounts of African-American folklore -- was her insight into human behavior, her rich use of metaphor and imagery and her dynamic personality.
Her novels were reviewed by the New York Times and Saturday Review, and she was considered to be a "real talent" of her time, he said. However, because of racial discrimination and prejudice, she was denied commercial success.
"Nine hundred and forty-five dollars was the most money one of her novels made," Hemenway said. "Many bookstores wouldn't even stock her books. ... They didn't want to imply equality."
Hemenway said his intent in penning the 353-page biography -- which is available at local bookstores -- was always simple.
"Zora Neale Hurston is a literary artist of sufficient talent to deserve intensive study, both as an artist and as an intellect," he wrote in the book.
"She deserves an important place in American literary history. I have tried to demonstrate why this is so, not in the interests of producing a 'definitive' book -- that book remains to be written, and by a black woman -- but in order to contribute to a new, closer examination of the unusual career of this complex author. This book provides an order to Hurston's life and an interpretation of her art; there are more biographical facts to be discovered, different interpretations to come."
Email contact: JR
Clairborne, queteam@ljworld.com
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