"In this fascinating and insightful book, Anna Lillios deepens our understanding of the complexity of the friendship between two of America's most beloved Southern female writers."ùVirginia L. Moylan, author of Zora Neale Hurston Final Decade<BR><BR>"Offers a great beginning to a long overdue critical conversation, one that places both Rawlings and Hurston in the highest echelon on twentieth-century American writers at the same time it explores their significant responses to a world struggling to come to terms with the tragedies of race and gender inequality."ùBrent Kinser, Western Carolina University<BR><BR>"A fascinating account of one of the few cross-racial friendships that existed between twentieth-century women writers. Their synergy helps us rethink any number of issues in the writing they did after the friendship began, including the environment, gender, class, regionalism, and of course, racial relations. When they met, Rawlings's star was in the ascendant; now, however, Hurston is universally admired, while her friend has been largely forgotten."-John Lowe, Louisiana State University<BR><BR>One of the twentieth century's most intriguing and complicated literary friendships was that between Zora Neale Hurston and Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings. In death, their reputations have reversed, but in the early 1940's Rawlings had already achieved wild success with her best-selling and Pulitzer Prizeûwinning novel, The Yearling, while Hurston had published Their Eyes Were Watching God to mostly positiv reviews, although some critics attacked her use of a "minstrel technique."<BR><BR>When they met, both were at the height of their literary powers. Hurston, the daughter of an Alabama slave, appears to have sought cm Rawlings, a transplanted upper-middle-class Yankee, as a writer who could understand her talent and as a potential patron and champion. Rawlings did become an advocate for Hurston, and by all accounts a warm friendship developed between the two. Yet at every turn, Rawlings's own racism and the societal norms of the Jim Crow South loomed on the horizon until her friendship with Hurston transformed Rawlings's views on the subject and made her advocate for racial equality.<BR><BR>Anna Lillios's Crossing the Creek is the First book to examine the productive and complex relationships between these two major figures. Is there truth to the story that Rawlings sent Hurston to sleep in the sevants' quarters when she came to visit? Or that Hurston offered to work as Rawlings's maid? If so, then why did Rawlings host Hurston at a tea in a segregated hotel in St. Augustine? In what ways did each write the friendship into her work? Using interviews with individuals who knew both women, as well as incisive readings of surviving letters, Lillios examines these questions and many others in this remarkable book.