The fire that genius brings: Creativity and the unhealed companionship between Zora Neale Hurston and Langston Hughes

This theoretical dissertation utilizes a Jungian lens to examine the lives and the literary work of Zora Neale Hurston and Langston Hughes for new information, insight, and understanding about their lived experiences, the dynamic of their relationship, and their creative collaboration. Hurston and Hughes met and became friends in New York City in 1925 during the height of the Harlem Renaissance. The two writers collaborated on a play, Mule Bone (Hughes & Hurston, 1931/1991), based on Hurston's short story, "The Bone of Contention" (Hurston, 1991). Predominant scholarship has focused primarily on explicit factors and reductive conclusions that nothing but a dispute over copyright instigated by Hurston caused the ending of their collaboration and friendship. This current qualitative research employs a phenomenological hermeneutic method of textual interpretation to identify the deeper psychological core of the underlying personal and cultural factors that shaped Hurston's and Hughes's personalities, informed the implicit dynamics between them, and influenced their mutual behavior and decisions. Accordingly, this work contends that Hurston's and Hughes's areas of personal unconsciousness, exacerbated by areas of cultural unconsciousness, were mutual factors that adversely affected their friendship and collaboration; and identifies evidence of healing and transformation in their literary work and in the artistic expressions of our contemporary culture.