Following on Moses, Man of the Mountain (1939), Hurston spent years studying the life of Herod the Great, the famed Jewish leader. Her editor rejected the resulting book, which wound up in a trunk and then, following her death, in flames\u2014the trunk burned by a crew hired to clear out her house\u2014and miraculously rescued by a passing sheriff\u2019s deputy who knew she was a writer. Hurston had two apparent purposes: She wished to chronicle \u201cthe 3,000 years struggle of the Jewish people for democracy and the rights of man,\u201d and she saw in Herod\u2019s alliance with Rome a metaphor for the Cold War struggle between Russia and the United States. While many ancient sources portray Herod as a tyrant, anticipating the fiercer denunciation of his son as the scourge of both Jesus Christ and John the Baptist, Hurston builds on other accounts; in particular, she rejects the charge that a monstrous Herod ordered \u201cthe massacre of the innocents,\u201d instead insisting that \u201che was beloved by the nation.\u201d The Herod of her story is a smolderingly handsome man suitable for a romance novel, which earns him the attention of a lustful and decidedly bad Mariamne, who repaid his blandishments by plotting his death, bringing it instead on herself: \u201cMariamne was dead. Dead. Never to burn away annoyances with her hot, soft body.\u201d Hurston sometimes writes with a kind of high-gothic-romance seriousness (\u201cMy own father is at fault for beseeching Caesar to reinstate this treacherous Hyrcanus in the priesthood\u201d), mixing in charming if perhaps not quite appropriate Southernisms (\u201cCleopatra knew more ways to kill a cat besides choking it to death on butter\u201d). Altogether, the manuscript, while an interesting historical document, lacks the polish of Hurston\u2019s classic books, such as Dust Tracks on a Road and Their Eyes Were Watching God.<\/p>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Following on Moses, Man of the Mountain (1939), Hurston spent years studying the life of Herod the Great, the famed Jewish leader. Her editor rejected the resulting book, which wound up in a trunk and then, following her death, in flames\u2014the trunk burned by a crew hired to clear out her house\u2014and miraculously rescued by […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":0,"featured_media":1548,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[6],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1547","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-interesting"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/bookloves.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1547"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/bookloves.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/bookloves.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bookloves.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1547"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/bookloves.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1547\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bookloves.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/1548"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/bookloves.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1547"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bookloves.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1547"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bookloves.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1547"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}