“Playing to Type” – Hilton Als, The New Yorker, May 16, 2011

In this review of the play, “By the Way, Meet Vera Stark,” The New Yorker critic Hilton Als acknowledged the revelation in my Fannie: The Talent for Success of Writer Fannie Hurst, that the relationship of Fannie with Zora Neale Hurston was the inspiration for Hurst’s mega-hit Imitation of Life. The story stemmed in part from a motor trip Zora and Fannie took across New York State with a detour into Canada, with Zora as driver. Fannie engineered the detour so she could see her secret lover, the arctic explorer Vilhjalmur Stefansson, who was appearing on the Chautauqua circuit. In establishing Fannie’s lifeline, the concurrence of the timing of the trip and the writing of the story are un-ignorable, especially given Hurst’s propensity to turn snapshots from her life and observations of the lives of others into fiction.) Als writes:

During the intermission, you might think of several things: the fact that Nottage was moved to write the play by her interest in Theresa Harris, who appeared as the maid and companion to Barbara Stanwyck’s anti-heroine in the 1933 movie “Baby Face”; or the way that Gloria and Vera’s relationship calls up other famous fictional partnerships—between the white entrepreneur and her black cook in Fannie Hurst’s popular 1933 novel, “Imitation of Life,” for instance, or in the 1959 film adaptation, starring Lana Turner. Hurst, in turn, was inspired, as her biographer Brooke Kroeger notes, by her friendship with Zora Neale Hurston, who worked for her briefly—a superior writer, who never had equivalent commercial success.

Grateful for this kind acknowledgment of an otherwise little-credited scoop which was thrilling in the discovery.

The Als piece can be read in full here.