Zora Neale Hurston and Langston Hughes, two giants of the Harlem Renaissance and American literature, were best friends . . . until they weren’t.

We won’t give too much away, but we urge you to circle March 26 on your calendar: That’s the date Yuval Taylor’s  Zora and Langston: A Story of Friendship and Betrayal, the first book to tell the full story of their friendship and its dramatic demise, hits the shelves.

Hurston and Hughes were collaborators, literary gadflies, and close companions from traveling together through the rural South collecting folklore to their work on the play Mule Bone. They even had the same patron: Charlotte Osgood Mason, a wealthy white woman who insisted on being called “Godmother”–who ultimately may have been the spark for their bitter falling-out.

Drawing on fresh material from Hurston and Hughes’ letters, the book digs deeply into the existing scholarship on both writers—and their times—to explore this unusual intimacy and the tragedy of its collapse.