Amistad to Release Never-Before-Published Novel by Zora Neale Hurston
Jul 11, 2024
HarperOne imprint Amistad will publish Zora Neale Hurston's The Life of Herod the Great, a never-before-published novel previously seen by only a handful of scholars. Publication is slated for January 7, 2025—what would have been Hurston's 134th birthday.
The novel is being ushered into publication by literary critic and scholar Deborah Plant, who previously brought Hurston's Barracoon: The Story of the Last “Black Cargo” (Amistad, 2018) to publication.
The Life of Herod the Great, which Hurston began in the 1950s and was still working on when she died in 1960, is set in first-century BC Judea and depicts Herod the Great "not as a villainous monster, but as a religious, philosophical, and adventurous man," per a release.
