Wrapped in Rainbows: The Life of Zora Neale Hurston

Valerie Boyd's was complemented Hurston's memoir Dust Tracks on a Road well. The memoir gives Hurston's voice and vision, but maintains certain fictions about her life (e.g., her age) and has some notable lacunae, results of its time of writing, what Hurston wanted to reveal, and her publisher's ham-handed editing of an outspoken black author to make her palatable for Jim Crow America. Boyd does a good job reconciling Hurston's memoir to her real life.
The scope of Boyd's biography necessarily far exceeds that of Dust Tracks, covering Hurston's family history, her marriages, background on her friends, the Harlem Renaissance, and her later life.
A sensitive examination of the life of this unique and important American voice.