The Chase and Ruins: Zora Neale Hurston in Honduras

In this scrupulous if narrow history, University of Alabama history professor Green (Remember Me to Miss Louisa) recounts novelist Zora Neale Hurston’s 1947 trip to Honduras searching for Mayan ruins. By the mid-1940s, Hurston’s literary popularity was in decline and she was struggling to eke out a living. An accomplished anthropologist, Hurston had heard about the ruins of a lost Mayan city in Honduras, and she decided to investigate in hopes that discovering it would reinvigorate her career. Green chronicles the eight months Hurston spent in Central America, noting that, though she didn’t find the ruins, “she liked it there because she did not see striking workers, communists,” or other reminders of the American liberalism she had come to detest. While there, Hurston wrote her novel Seraph on the Suwanee, the last book she published in her lifetime and her first to center on a white protagonist, a decision Hurston hoped (in vain) would help her make inroads in Hollywood. Green’s reconstruction of Hurston’s time in Honduras sheds light on an overlooked, though not necessarily critical, period of the author’s life. Unfortunately, a surfeit of tangents drags this down; for instance, Green devotes a chapter to British travel writer María Soltera’s 1881 visit to Honduras for the flimsy reason that both were single women trying to further their careers there. This is for Hurston completists only. Photos. (Oct.)