As for Communism and the radical left, Hurston had little use for what she saw as patronizing attitudes toward the "pitiful" Negro, and surprisingly, according to Kaplan, she was even willing to name names and to "denounce African-American leftists...who had once been her friends and allies." "I expect this might upset some people," adds Kaplan. "[We] like our icons to be seamless."

Indeed, Kaplan seems a great deal more willing than Boyd to speculate about the more controversial aspects of Hurston's life. For example, Hurston's troubling declaration that "slavery is the price I paid for civilization" doesn't even get a mention in the biography, which errs at times on the side of excessive tenderness. "It's the kind of statement that contemporary readers have had strong reactions to," explained Boyd when I asked her about the omission during an interview. "But it wasn't such an important quote in the context of her life."

And while Kaplan would like to have found even more material for her collection ("there's a Richard Nixon [letter] that I couldn't get," she laments, "letters to Bertram Lippincott...to family friends...to Edna St. Vincent Millay"), both hers and Boyd's works are lusciously rich additions to an ever-expanding Hurston canon.

"When I get old and my joints and bones tell me about it," Hurston once noted, "I can write for myself, if for nobody else, and read slowly and carefully the mysticism of the East, and re-read Spinoza with love and care. All the while my days can be a succession of coffee cups." Together with a 1956 photo (in which her age has finally begun to show) in which the right side of her face is clearly distorted, these ruminations are almost too much to bear.

I, for one, imagine a sister-writer like myself, tending her azaleas and morning glories and gardenias in the predawn quiet time of her life, and wish to God that I could offer Hurston even one more year to create her art, free from worry. She's not well in the end, Kaplan told me during an interview. "Her hand is shaking" in those last letters, "either out of emotion or ill health," as she offers one last query to a publisher. "It's tragic," she adds.

For her choices, there is no question that Hurston suffered. She might have stayed married to her first husband, Herbert Sheen, and lived a comfortable life as a doctor's wife. Or tailored her personality and ambitions to fit into the mandates of any one of the Negro colleges where she worked briefly. Instead, she refused to compromise, even a little bit, when it came to her dreams. "She wanted not only books to read," notes Boyd, speaking of a younger, bright-eyed Hurston longing to go to school. "But the kind of life that could fill a book. She wanted to stride beyond the perimeters of small-town Florida and beyond the parameters of a small-town black life. She wanted education and excitement and adventure. She wanted a big life."

"Oh, if you knew my dreams!" Hurston once wrote to Meyer while still at Barnard. "My vaulting ambition! How I constantly live in fancy in seven league boots, taking mighty strides across the world, but conscious all the time of being a mouse on a treadmill. Madness ensues. I am beside myself with chagrin half of the time; the way to the blue hills is not on tortoise back, it seems to me, but on wings. I havent the wings, and must ride the tortoise..."

Yes, but now it seems even the tortoise has grown wings, for Zora.

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