ZORA HURSTON AND THE STRANGE CASE OF RUBY MCCOLLUM, by C. Arthur Ellis, Jr., Ph.D. (Release date 1/12/09)

In the timber camps of North Florida in the 1930s, Zora Neale Hurston discovered the unwritten segregationist law of paramour rights, the right of a white man to take a "colored" woman as his mistress and force her to have his children.

Twenty years later, she received an assignment from the Pittsburgh Courier to cover the trial of Ruby McCollum, a wealthy colored woman, for shooting and killing her white physician lover, Dr. C. Leroy Adams, who had recently been elected to the Florida state senate. Intrigued by what she considered a case of paramour rights, Hurston packed her bags and headed to the small town of Live Oak to cover a story that, in her own words, "had all the drama and varied play of human emotions that fill the pages of great literature from Plutarch to Shakespeare."

What she discovered when she arrived in Live Oak was a story of interracial sex, greed, drugs and murder, cloaked by the guilty silence of a town afraid of "outsiders" exposing the subterranean world of relationships between colored and white communities.

While Hurston's coverage of the trial was published in the Courier, and portions of her notes were published in William B. Huie's Ruby McCollum: Woman in the Suwannee Jail, Hurston never published a book on the story.

Now, in this richly illustrated volume, readers may read the story of Ruby McCollum, written in Hurston's voice, and see the characters and places that she saw when she covered the trial.

(484 pages, hardcover with dustjacket, 36 grayscale illustrations. Retails at $34.95 through major bookstores and online retailers).

A publication of Gadfly Publishing, LLC. "Changing the world, one book at a time." www.gadflypublishing.com