From critically acclaimed journalist Valerie Boyd comes an eloquent profile of one of the most intriguing cultural figures of the twentieth century—Zora Neale Hurston. A woman of enormous talent and remarkable drive, Zora Neale Hurston published seven books, many short stories, and several articles and plays over a career that spanned more than thirty years. Today, nearly every black woman writer of significance—including Maya Angelou, Toni Morrison, and Alice Walker—acknowledges Hurston as a literary foremother, and her 1937 masterpiece Their Eyes Were Watching God has become a crucial part of the modern literary canon. Wrapped in Rainbows , the first biography of Zora Neale Hurston in more than twenty-five years, illuminates the adventures, complexities, and sorrows of an extraordinary life. Acclaimed journalist Valerie Boyd delves into Hurston’s history—her youth in the country’s first incorporated all-black town, her friendships with luminaries such as Langston Hughes, her sexuality and short-lived marriages, and her mysterious relationship with vodou. With the Harlem Renaissance, the Great Depression, and World War II as historical backdrops, Wrapped in Rainbows not only positions Hurston’s work in her time but also offers riveting implications for our own. The Washington Post Scrupulously researched, gracefully written...the definitive Hurston biography. The Boston Globe An elegant and exhilarating biography. The Philadelphia Inquirer Boyd paints a stunning portrait...in prose dazzlingly powerful, intellectually rigorous, and passionately poignant. O, The Oprah Magazine Hugely satisfying....With loving regard and agile scholarship, Boyd fills the gaps in Hurston's exhilarating life. Edwidge Danticat author of Breath, Eyes, Memory This biography is gorgeous, epic, larger than life, and like Ms. Hurston's own work is a momentous treasure, not to be missed. Valerie Boyd was the author of the critically acclaimed biography Wrapped in Rainbows: The Life of Zora Neale Hurston , winner of the Southern Book Award and the American Library Association’s Notable Book Award. She was the founder and director of the MFA Program in Narrative Nonfiction and the Charlayne Hunter-Gault professor of journalism at the University of Georgia. She was editor-at-large at the University of Georgia Press and senior consulting editor for The Bitter Southerner . Chapter One: Sky Blue Bottoms There was never quite enough for Zora Neale Hurston in the world she grew up in, so she made up whatever she needed. In her father's house, on five acres of land in central Florida, young Zora lacked no material comforts. She had eight rooms to roam; a large yard carpeted with Bermuda grass; plenty of playmates; seven siblings; ample amounts of yellow Octagon laundry soap for bathing; two big chinaberry trees for climbing; enough leftover boiled eggs to use as hand grenades on other children; and all the home-cured meat, garden-fresh collard greens, and Mama-made cornbread she could eat. But Zora had other needs. She needed to know, for instance, what the end of the world was like -- "whether it was sort of tucked under like the hem of a dress," as she once wrote, or if it was just "a sharp drop-off into nothingness." One summer day around 1900, when she was about nine years old, Zora decided she ought to walk out to the horizon and see. She asked a friend, a schoolmate named Carrie Roberts, to go with her. The next morning, bright and soon, Zora and Carrie were to meet by the palmettos near Zora's house to begin their journey to the edge of the world. Daunted by the daring of the thing, Carrie came to tell Zora she couldn't go. That perhaps they should wait until they were big enough to wear long dresses and old enough to stay out past sundown without earning a spanking. Zora pleaded with her friend, but she refused to go. They fought, and Zora went home, she wrote decades later, "and hid under the house with my heartbreak." Still, she recalled, "I did not give up the idea of my journey. I was merely lonesome for someone brave enough to undertake it with me." Zora decided to put off her trip until she had something to ride on. Then, she reasoned, she could go alone. "So for weeks I saw myself sitting astride of a fine horse," she would remember. "My shoes had sky-blue bottoms to them, and I was riding off to look at the belly-band of the world." The summer, lush with the fragrance of Florida oranges and the cries of the mockingbirds, surrendered to fall. Then Christmas-time came. A few days before Christmas that year, Zora's father -- John Hurston, a preacher and carpenter -- did something unusual. After dinner, he pushed back from the table and asked his children a question. What did they want Santa Claus to bring them? Zora's oldest brothers wanted baseball outfits, she recalled in her autobiography years later. Her younger brothers wanted air rifles. Her big sister wanted patent leather pumps and a b