SOURCE: “A Tragedy of Negro Life,” in Mule Bone: A Comedy of Negro Life by Langston Hughes and Zora Neale Hurston, Harper Perennial, 1991, pp. 5-24.

In the following essay, Gates details the collaboration of Langston Hughes and Hurston on the play Mule Bone, and describes the plot and historical influence of the drama.

This play was never done because the authors fell out.

—Langston Hughes, 1931

And fall out, unfortunately, they did, thereby creating the most notorious literary quarrel in African-American cultural history, and one of the most thoroughly documented collaborations in black American literature. Langston Hughes published an account entitled “Literary Quarrel” as the penultimate chapter—indeed, almost as a coda or an afterthought—in his autobiography, The Big Sea (1940). Robert Hemenway, Zora Neale Hurston's biographer, published a chapter in his biography entitled “Mule Bone,” and Arnold Rampersad, Hughes's biographer, presents an equally detailed account in volume one...