Brian Norman

Bio

Brian Norman is currently Dean of the Gwen Ifill College of Media, Arts, and Humanities at Simmons University in Boston where he is also Professor of English. He is the author of Dead Women Talking: Figures of Injustice in American Literature (Johns Hopkins 2013), Neo-Segregation Narratives: Jim Crow in Post-Civil Rights American Literature (University of Georgia Press 2010), and The American Protest Essay and National Belonging (SUNY Press 2007), and coediter with Piper Kendrix Williams of Representing Segregation (SUNY Press 2010).

@BrianNorman13 @IfillCollege

Contributions

Failed Collaboration: Langston Hughes, Zora Hurston, and the Possibilities of Cocreation

Peer Reviewed

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One of the best-known feuds in American literature is the attempted collaboration between Zora Neale Hurston and Langston Hughes. In 1930, they decided to cowrite a play based on Hurston’s field work in African American southern folk culture and her unpublished story “The Bone of Contention.” However, The Mule-Bone never met page or stage in their lifetimes and it ended their friendship. Or, to use Hughes’s now famous hand-written manuscript notation, “the authors fell out.” Henry Louis Gates Jr...

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collaboration authorship