Zora Neale Hurston’s Portrait of a Hero : Herod of the “Sun-like Splendor”

Shoshana Milgram Knapp, Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University

Zora Neale Hurston’s The Life of Herod the Great is a work of salvage and recovery, in more than one sense. Composed in the 1950s, rejected by several publishers, preserved in Zora Neale Hurston’s trunk, the manuscript was saved from the flames when a crew tasked with clearing out her home, after her death, tried to burn the trunk. In 2025, Deborah Plant published the recovered manuscript: she assembled the chapters, inferred the words missing from scorched pages, and made use of Hurston’s letters to fill in the blanks. Hurston’s novel itself aspired to present the man revealed by the facts, not the man concealed by folklore, and emphatically not the man denigrated by the Gospel of Matthew and distorted by resentful historians. Committed to justice, loyal to friends and family who merited his allegiance ,opposed to any form of intellectual passivity, dedicated to every nation for which he fought, Herod was a heroic leader, a brave soldier, a skilled athlete, a loyal friend, a defender of literature and culture, which he saw as the province of all men and women. In this novel, a historical figure with a problematic reputation is a candidate deserving to be known as genuinely great, and not, as Matthew has it, as the murderer of innocents.

No extended abstract or paper available

 Presented in Session 163. Valor, Values, and Volition: Willa Cather, Zora Neale Hurston, Ayn Rand