In the summer of 1931, a then-unknown author named Zora Neale Hurston was hired to drive the married, Jewish novelist Fannie Hurst up to Canada for a liason with her lover, an Arctic explorer. That ride, taken eighty years ago this month, purportedly inspired Hurst’s eighth novel, Imitation of Life, her first literary examination of racial themes.

In 2005, on the occasion of the reissues of Imitation of Life and The Stories of Fannie Hurst, Kate Bolick wondered, “How could one of the early 20th-century’s most celebrated writers, whose every move made headlines, who was as socially engaged as she was prolific, be so completely forgotten?” One reason, Bolick suspects, was that her widespread admirers didn’t outlast negative reviews. “Hurst was adored by fans,” Bolick writes, “and abhorred by the critics.”

Hurst had a complicated relationship to Jewishness (“her characters would often eat noodle pudding, but never kugel”), and is thought to have been more at ease using black characters, like Imitation of Life’s Peola, to examine her Jewish identity. Her relationships with up-and-coming black writers like Hurston and Langston Hughes were tested by the novel’s 1933 publication, and Hughes soon wrote Limitation of Life, a stage parody with reversed racial roles.

Bolick contends that while Hurst was not a Great American Writer, she ought to be remembered as a great American storyteller:

Her ability to touch such a wide, and not very literate, audience, and so profoundly, was a significant variety of social activism. … But for all her success the fact was she spoke from—and to—the margins. By doing so, she not only taught her readership—whether Jewish, black, or working class—how to consider, shape, and ultimately legitimize their own experiences, but also gave them lowly, practical information, such as how to avoid getting tuberculosis.

Read Hurst and Hurston, by Kate Bolick

Joanna Neborsky

We scoured Tablet Magazine’s and Nextbook.org’s archives to find books (and their writers) long forgotten. Each week we will feature one lost book and the story behind it. So blow the dust off the cover, and begin!

Hurst and Hurston: Seventy years after their road trip, the best-selling sentimental novelist has run out of gas, while Zora is still in the driver’s seat. By Kate Bolick

No Exit: Raised in the last golden days of the Hapsburgs, the Viennese writer Stefan Zweig found his world shattered by war. By Jennifer Weisberg

Restoration Project: Where have all Bernard Malamud’s readers gone? By Rachel Donadio

Back from the Shadows: Dovid Bergelson’s skepticism served him poorly in life but sublimely in art. By Boris Fishman

Third Look: On rereading Leonard Michaels’s I Would Have Saved Them If I Could. By Shalom Auslander

The Odd-Bod: In literary London, Elias Canetti was everybody’s favorite refugee. By Jonathan Wilson

School Ties: Jacques de Lacretelle won praise when he wrote in Dreyfus’ shadow, but today his portrait of a prep-school peer looks grotesque. By Paul LaFarge

Glamour and Peril: Tempestuous, cold, and intensely private, Elsa Morante considered herself a genius. Are others finally starting to agree? By Andrea Crawford

Melting Point: British playwright Israel Zangwill coined America’s most enduring metaphor as his reputation dissolved in controversy. By Chloe Veltman

Give ‘Em Hecht: A young Chicago newspaperman thought he was perfect for the part of his hero. By Neal Pollack

The Spy Who Loved Me: An Israeli thriller that captivated Graham Greene. By Paul LaFarge

King of the Forest: The Viennese pornographer turned critic who dreamed up Bambi. By David Rakoff

Funny Guys Finish Last: Philip Roth and Bruce Jay Friedman were rising stars in the 1960s. Roth became part of the canon. Friedman became “that guy who wrote Splash.” By Meg Wolitzer

Westward Expansion: Prostitutes, Christian Scientists, cross-dressing teachers. By Margy Rochlin

A Fine Mess: How a filmmaker turned his movie flop into a groundbreaking book. By Lawrence Levi

Asch’s Passion: A popular Yiddish novelist strove for immortality by taking on Jesus, but it cost him his core audience and made him a marked man. By Ellen Umansky

So Big: Human awkwardness was at the heart of Edna Ferber’s popular novels, but she shied away from writing about the outsiders she knew best. By Mollie Wilson

Fall From Grace: In 1843, British novelist Grace Aguilar was a household name on both sides of the Atlantic. So how come we’ve never heard of her? By Justin Taylor

A Woman Out of Time: In 1938, at the height of U.S. isolationism, Americans devoured Phyllis Bottome’s chronicle of a German-Jewish family’s struggle to survive under the Nazi regime. By Andrea Crawford

Regatta Land: Amid Harvard’s ivy-covered bricks, the hero of Myron Kaufmann’s Remember Me to God struggles to become part of the in crowd. By Josh Lambert

Great Pretenders: In Romain Gary’s family, invention was the necessity of mother and son. By Emma Garman

Wartime Truths: In 1945, Jerzy Andrzejewski’s novel of the Warsaw ghetto enraged Poles and Jews alike. How will it read to audiences today? By Andrea Crawford

Dizzy with Life: Clarice Lispector’s gorgeous, vibrant writings made one writer’s head—and heart—spin. By Anderson Tepper

Storm Warning: The surprising alliance at the heart of John Oliver Killens. By Josh Lambert

In Bloom: Pearl Buck breathes life into a disappearing Chinese community. By Jennifer Cody Epstein

Toward the Abyss: The final work of a doomed Yiddish novelist. By Elizabeth Mitchell

The Student Who Wouldn’t Go Away: How a bumbling immigrant from Kiev became a literary sensation. By Jennifer Weisberg

What Happened to Mary Berg? A young girl’s account of the Warsaw Ghetto was a big success. Then the diary—and its author—disappeared. By Amy Rosenberg

The Good of ‘A Bad Man:’ How Stanley Elkin hit his stride. By Sarah Almond

The Hermit of Oliphant: After the literary pioneer Dvora Baron immigrated to Palestine, she never again ventured out. By Haim Watzman

The Road Not Taken: Decades before Herzl, Benjamin Disraeli wrote a novel that grappled with Zionism. By Adam Kirsch

Third Life: For Jakov Lind, reinvention was the heart of fiction. By Sasha Weiss

The Paragraph That Changed My Life: On Yaakov Shabtai’s Past Continuous. By Todd Hask-Lowy

Baruch Obama: How a black president was imagined as a Jewish one, more or less. By Ben Greenman

Comeback Kid: Having failed to assimilate, Ludwig Lewisohn went on to write the great American Jewish novel. By Josh Lambert

Beginning of the End: Decadence and anti-Semitism in Arthur Schnitzler’s Vienna. By Wesley Yang

Touchy Subject: Frederick Busch feared his novel Invisible Mending would upset readers. He didn’t anticipate his own discomfort. By Andrea Crawford

Child’s Play: Seventy years ago, a contentious novel scrutinized Judaism through the eyes of a young boy. By Sasha Weiss

Where the Heart Is: A 1951 novel parses the meaning of home. By Elizabeth Gumport

Swallowed Whole: Réjean Ducharme’s mysterious 1966 novel. By Benjamin Nugent

Big Bang: With Lionel Trilling and Robert Giroux cheerleading, Sam Astrachan had a stellar future. Then the glimmer faded. By Josh Lambert

A Wanderer in the Desert: How a tubercular shoemaker became a great Yiddish poet. By Jacqueline Osherow

Of a Feather: Communing with Bernard Malamud’s Jewbird. By Joe Hill

Equally wide-ranging and diverse are the Americans for whom Moses was a household name and a moral touchstone. In their darkest days, the Pilgrims sought comfort by reading about Moses’ tribulations, Feiler tells us, as did the founding fathers for whom the “reluctant leader of Israelite slaves end[s] up as the favorite son.” An affection for Moses also ran in families: Henry Ward Beecher and his sister, Harriet Beecher Stowe were quite smitten with him. But then, so, too, were Cecil B. DeMille and Martin Luther King Jr. Feiler’s inventory of Moses’ fans and champions is so encompassing and expansive, you have to wonder whether there was anyone at all in America who did not cotton to the man.

Drawing on dozens of vignettes, the author goes further still, insisting that there’s hardly an American institution that has not been touched by Moses’ staff. Feiler is so taken with his subject, in fact, that he is moved to write in one of the book’s most eye-opening sentences that “Moses is our true founding father. His face belongs on Mount Rushmore.”

In his exuberant telling of Moses’ popularity and far-reaching impact on virtually every nook and cranny of American life, Feiler can’t help sounding a little like the author of The Da Vinci Code. He moves at breakneck speed and peppers his prose with lots of “aha”s. Cycling quickly through broad swaths of time and complex historical phenomena as if they were stops along the Tour de France, Feiler dispatches George Washington’s putative relationship with Moses, say, in a brisk couple of pages before moving on to something else entirely. His account accumulates encounters, quotes, and choice details, overwhelming the reader with a mountain of information.

And yet, there’s nary a footnote in sight. Instead, the book’s authority rests largely on Feiler himself. He puts his quest for Moses the American at the center of the narrative, seeking out thinkers like Peter Gomes, Jonathan Sarna, and Michael Walzer for tête-à-têtes about the biblical character’s impact on America; visiting museum curators; donning the costume that Charlton Heston wore when he played Moses in DeMille’s The Ten Commandments; and even meeting with George W. Bush in the White House for a chat about Moses’ impact on the presidency.

After making my way through America’s Prophet, I don’t doubt that America—then, as now—found the Israelite leader to be a most congenial fellow, bending him to its own political, rhetorical, and symbolic uses. But the Moses who inhabits these pages ends up being so protean and malleable a figure that it’s hard to figure out where he begins and America ends. Feiler’s unabashed celebration of his subject, whom he likens at one point to a “kind of American Hamlet,” leaves little room for nuance, equivocation, and the sifting of sources. The hundreds of references to and perspectives on the man that animate the book end up sounding the same note: three cheers for Moses. The net effect is to flatten rather than clarify his appeal.

In the end, Feiler is so busy trumpeting America’s affinity for the biblical figure that you are left to wonder what the affinity actually proves. What does it say about this great big republic of ours that so many of its leaders made use of Moses and the Exodus story for their own ends—as a call to arms, a rallying point, a cautionary tale? Why did the United States clasp Moses to its bosom when so many other God-fearing nations did not? Where are we to draw the line between religion and politics or, for that matter, between religion and the public square? By the time we put down America’s Prophet, we’re none the wiser. But we sure can cite chapter and verse.

Jenna Weissman Joselit is a professor of Judaic studies and history at George Washington University. She is currently at work on a book about America’s relationship to the Ten Commandments.

Fannie Hurst

Hurst’s huge and energetic life had colorful episodes to spare, but this one in particular has proven irresistible to biographers and filmmakers. The tableau the pair created is undeniably vivid: at the wheel, a poor black writer and folklorist, a young-looking 41-years old, utterly unknown, though not for long; in back, a rich and famous Jewish author with the world on a string. The scene even speaks to Hurst’s passion for black culture—a passion that may have had as much to do with her discomfort over being Jewish as it did with her political convictions. Finally, like a riddle, the episode seems to possess the secret to a perplexing question: How could one of the early 20th-century’s most celebrated writers, whose every move made headlines, who was as socially engaged as she was prolific, be so completely forgotten? Hurst’s 18 novels and more than 300 short stories earned her a front-page obituary in The New York Times, but chances are you’ve never heard of her. Today, of course, it’s Hurston we read in high school. (And watch on TV. An adaptation of Their Eyes Were Watching God, starring Halle Berry, airs on March 6.)

Hurst’s is an exceptional example of the vagaries of literary reputation. Her success in her lifetime was so extraordinary, and her posthumous obscurity so absolute, it almost seems she was banished. How else to explain her near erasure? But banishment would require that someone wished her gone, and nobody really cared that much one way or the other. Save, that is, for a small band of scholars and enthusiasts who have finally put Hurst back in print, with two new reissues: Imitation of Life and The Stories of Fannie Hurst.

Hurst was a phenomenon from the start—the larger-than-life type one can’t picture dead, never mind forgotten. Born in St. Louis in 1885, the only child of German Jews, she cultivated a dramatic, artsy persona through theater and writing at Washington University, moved to New York in 1910, and simply neglected to schedule in the requisite struggling-artist phase. In 1912 the hugely popular Saturday Evening Post invited her to become a regular contributor; two years later she was confiding to a friend in a letter, “I am so busy!—so busy and so happy in just a whole raft of the most unbelievable new successes!”; in 1915 William Dean Howells branded the 30-year-old one of the foremost writers of “the Hebraic school”—a school, as it happens, she wasn’t terribly interested in being a member of.

Hurst’s ambivalence over her Jewishness comes as a surprise given her early subject matter: from the start of her writing career and through the early 1920s she fictionalized the lives of German Jewish and Eastern European immigrant families on the Lower East Side. Her stories were lively, well-told, generously described works of often sentimental social realism that repeatedly featured young, working-class heroines.

Not content to rely on her imagination—or her own Midwestern middle-class experience—Hurst honed her ear for dialogue and her knack for just the right detail with frequent visits to tenements and sweatshops. Her first professionally published story, “The Joy of Living,” which appeared in the small but influential Reedy’s Mirror two weeks before she graduated from college, is rich with the smells of “grease-saturated potatoes” and the desultory heat of a sleeping child. “Summer Sources,” one of her early stories for the Saturday Evening Post, and the first of her “Hebrew stories,” describes the working girl not in the city, but at an ocean-side resort hotel, where Jewish mothers did their competitive best to arrange suitable marriages for their daughters.

Yet for all her verisimilitude, Hurst avoided using Yiddish. Susan Koppelman points out in her insightful introduction to the reissued stories that Hurst would use spellings like “goil” and “theayter,” but rarely used words like schlemiel, and that her characters would often eat noodle pudding, but never kugel. Was this a calculated choice, made with an eye on her larger, non-Jewish, possibly anti-Semitic audience? Or an unconscious omission born of a deep-seated unease with her own identity?

Odds are, it was a bit of both. As Hurst describes in her 1958 memoir, Anatomy of Me, she was raised by parents who felt strongly that she not marry a “kike”—their term for a Jewish man—and she inherited their anxieties. “I would have given anything,” she wrote, for her mother not to tell people they were Jewish. Hurst outgrew the worst of this shame, and even went on to marry a darkly handsome Jewish pianist named Jacques Danielson, but as her reputation flowered, and her social activism increased, she steered clear of community causes. Zionism only “segregates us, raises barriers or creates race prejudice,” she told the Jewish Tribune in 1925. A few years later, another interviewer was so struck by what she considered to be Hurst’s intellectual indifference to Palestine as to note: “She speaks decisively and forcefully enough to discourage debate. She pleasantly drops the hint with all answers that you can take it or leave it.”

For a woman as opinionated and outspoken as Hurst, such indifference was at the very least peculiar, especially given her fervent enthusiasm for myriad other socialist, liberal, humanitarian, and feminist causes. “There seems to have been no aspect of early-twentieth-century American culture—dieting figures heavily here—in which she was not involved,” writes Hurst’s biographer, Brooke Kroeger. It is tempting to speculate that lurking beneath Hurst’s genuine political convictions were careerist and even escapist impulses, particularly when considering her championing of black culture.

Hurst maintained a “Negro Matters” file folder on her desk, and it was always full. If she didn’t exactly make research excursions to Harlem the way she had the sweatshops, starting in the mid-1920s she threw herself wholeheartedly—à la Carl Van Vechten—into her role as friend and patron to emerging Harlem Renaissance writers. Langston Hughes, Dorothy West, and especially Hurston all profited from their association with Hurst—and in certain ways, some scholars have speculated, the rewards were mutual. On the one hand, Hurst may have been more comfortable confronting loaded racial questions through another’s blackness than through her own Jewishness. On the other hand, she may have used that very blackness as a foil. According to Hurston’s biographer Robert Hemenway, Hurston believed that Hurst liked the way her black friend’s complexion made her look more white—that is, not Jewish.

If Hurston was thinking as much on her memorable road trip to Canada, it appears Hurst was harboring her own complicated feelings as well; it was on that trip that Imitation of Life, Hurst’s eighth novel, and her first to deal with racial themes, was born. Published in 1933, the book chronicles the improbable ascent of a widowed single mother (of no specified faith), Bea Pullman, who, with the help of her black maid, Delilah, pulls herself out of poverty by creating a maple syrup empire and a national waffle house franchise. The story’s engine is female entrepreneurship, its highs and ultimately its lows. But through Bea and Delilah’s relationship to one another, as well as their relationships to their offspring, race and class comprise the book’s true intellectual backbone: Bea’s daughter Jessie has all the advantages, and personality defects, money can buy; Delilah’s light-skinned Peola is yoked with the ability to pass as white. As Daniel Itzkovitz speculates in his incisive introduction to the reissue, Hurst may have been more comfortable exploring her relationship to her own Jewish identity through black characters such as Peola; her childhood shame over being Jewish closely resembles Peola’s over being black.

In response to Imitation of Life‘s publication, Harlem exploded in a frenzy of divisiveness: some believed Hurst “had created black characters with depth and humanity” while others argued that the Aunt Jemima-like Delilah perpetuated a stereotype. Her black friends, meanwhile, were cagier. Hughes expressed support, but it wasn’t long before he mounted a skewering stage parody, Limitation of Life, in which the racial roles were reversed. And according to Hurston’s most recent biographer, Valerie Boyd, Hurston never mentioned the novel in her correspondence of that period, and may have even taken a veiled swipe or two in print.

The eruption had little lasting effect on Hurst’s reputation, however, which, for all her runaway successes, was always divided—Hurst was adored by her fans and abhorred by the critics. “It happens every two years…the new novel by Fannie Hurst…. Book critics moan. The public buys it like mad,” Newsweek reported in 1944. And as each of Hurst’s two new reissues bears out, far from being the purveyors of fickle literary fashions, these critics had it right in the end.

For all their vivacity, neither reissue supports Koppelman’s conviction that “Fannie Hurst is a Great American Writer.” Her “rare insights into what is now a lost world,” as Koppelman puts it, should certainly be appreciated, as should “the richness, variety, and authenticity of Fannie Hurst’s early portrayals of urban Jewish life.” But these are the distinctions of a cultural anthropologist, not a literary great. To posit her as a Great American Writer is to confuse and even diminish the title.

Instead, Hurst should be remembered as a Great American Storyteller, and one who did extraordinary things with the form. Her ability to touch such a wide, and not very literate, audience, and so profoundly, was a significant variety of social activism. Perhaps Hurst didn’t exactly choose to be anti-establishment; the literary community snubbed her, not the other way around. But for all her success the fact was she spoke from—and to—the margins. By doing so, she not only taught her readership—whether Jewish, black, or working class—how to consider, shape, and ultimately legitimize their own experiences, but also gave them lowly, practical information, such as how to avoid getting tuberculosis.

For Hurst, fame didn’t cancel out her social conscience, it enlarged it: The more popular she grew the more actively she engaged with her times, and the more active her engagement the deeper and broader her concerns (aside from Jewish matters). Yet she was never polemical, or didactic, in the tradition of many socially concerned writers, and stayed true throughout her life to the forms and conventions of fiction. As Kroeger puts it, “In every way, especially given her ordinary origins, her life epitomized what was exciting, important, and forward-thinking about her times.” And it’s for her sheer grasp of that present, and her generosity with it, that she should be remembered.