Help Celebrate the 135th Birthday of the Great Zora Neale Hurson by Watching this PBS documentary Zora Neale Hurston: Claiming A Space. She was a Legendary Writer of the Old Right, along with Rose Wilder Lane, Ayn Rand, and Isabel Paterson

Black Libertarian: The Story of Zora Neale Hurston, by Marcus Epstein

Isabel Paterson, Rose Wilder Lane, and Zora Neale Hurston on War, Race, the State, and Liberty, by David T. Beito and Linda Royster Beito

Here the tone is celebratory yet deeply probing. The Beitos’ exploration of the commonality of character and individualistic temperament of this trio of remarkable authors makes for fascinating reading. In particular, notice how they extensively deal with Lane’s pioneering work as a wartime columnist with The Pittsburgh Courier, one of America’s largest circulation Black newspapers,

But in the end, it is the damning fact that Rose Wilder Lane, her mother Laura (as well as Paterson and Hurston) strongly opposed Democrat Franklin Delano Roosevelt and the regimentation of his New Deal. That will never be abided by the Empire State sophisticates at The New Yorker (which endorsed Barack Obama). Hence this subtle attack on those middle class Americans who still see the writing of Laura Ingalls Wilder and her daughter Rose as possessing admirable virtues of individualism, self-reliance, independence, and resistance to authority.