Zora Neale Hurston was an American folklorist, anthropologist, and author. She is considered one of the pre-eminent writers of twentieth-century African-American literature and was closely associated with the Harlem Renaissance.
Hurston was born in 1891 in Notasulga, Alabama. At the age of three, her family moved to Eatonville Florida, one of the first incorporated black towns. She grew up seeing black people, including her father in positions of power and was largely sheltered from contact with white people, and so did not experience discrimination. At the age of 13, Hurston’s mother died. Her father caused a minor scandal by quickly remarrying a woman who had no time for children, and Hurston struggled to finish her schooling while working a series of menial jobs. Eventually, she joined a Gilbert & Sullivan traveling troupe as a maid to the lead singer.
In 1917, Hurston was 26 and had yet to complete high school. She changed her year of birth to 1901 in order to qualify for free public schooling and enrolled at Morgan College. 1918, she graduated high school and continued her education at Howard University, where she wrote for the school paper and studied Spanish, English, Greek and public speaking, earning an associate degree in the 1920s. A few years later, she moved to Harlem, where she became a part of the
the Harlem Renaissance of the 1920s, and her apartment became a popular spot for social gatherings. She became friends with such luminaries Langston Hughes, Ethel Waters and Countee Cullen among others. Hurston began to experience literary success, one of her short stories, John Redding Goes to Sea qualified her to become a member of Alaine Locke’s literary club, The Stylus. Her short story, “Spunk” was selected for The New Negro, a landmark anthology of fiction, poetry, and essays focusing on African and African-American art and literature.
In 1925, Hurston was awarded a scholarship to attend Barnard College, Columbia University, where she became the only black student. Hurston studied anthropology, giving her the opportunity to conduct ethnographic research with Franz Boas. During her time at Barnard, she also worked with fellow students Margaret Mead. She graduated with a B.A in 1928, and spent two further years at Columbia as a graduate student, during this time she conducted field field studies in folklore among African Americans in the South sponsored by folklorist Charlotte Mason. Hurston wrote her novel Jonah’s Gourd Vine (1934) based on this research, and a year later published Mules and Men which contains a section on African-American folktales taken from her research in oral folklore, and a section on the practice of hoodoo from a field study in New Orleans. The book became her bestselling work during her lifetime. That same year, Hurston established a school of dramatic arts “based on pure Negro expression” at Bethune-Cookman University (at the time, Bethune-Cookman College), a historically black college in Daytona Beach, Florida.
In 1937, Hurston published Their Eyes Were Watching God. The novel deals with the story of a black woman looking for love and happiness in the South and was criticised at the time, particularly by black male writers who felt she should be taking a political stand instead of celebrating the rich tradition of the rural black South. It is now considered her masterwork. She followed this with Tell My Horse (1938), a study of Caribbean Voodoo practices which was made possible by her award of the prestigious Guggenheim Fellowship. The award financed her trip to conduct ethnographic research in Jamaica and Haiti. She then published a novel, Moses, Man of the Mountain (1939) but it wasn’t until 1942 that she began to receive acclaim when she published her autobiography, Dust Tracks on a Road. That same year, she was profiled in Who’s Who in America, Current Biography and Twentieth Century Authors. In 1948, she published her last novel, Seraph on the Suwanee.
Despite her literary success, Hurston struggled financially while continuing to write for periodicals like The American Mercury and The Saturday Evening Post. She also served on the faculty of North Carolina College for Negroes (now North Carolina Central University) in Durham, North Carolina. In 1956, Hurston was honoured with the Bethune-Cookman College Award for Education and Human Relations in recognition of her achievements. The English Department at Bethune-Cookman College remains dedicated to preserving her cultural legacy. She later worked at the Pan American World Airways Technical Library at Patrick Air Force Base before moving to Fort Piece in Florida where she worked as a substitute teacher and then a maid to make ends meet.
In 1960, Hurston died while living in the St. Lucie County Welfare Home, her neighbors in Fort Pierce, Florida, took up a collection to pay for her funeral but were unable to pay for a headstone. She was buried in an unmarked grave. More than a decade later, the writer Alice Walker travelled to Fort Pierce to place a marker on the grave of the author which read “Zora Neale Hurston: A Genius of the South.” Walker’s own work was inspired by Hurston, and in 1975 her essay “In Search of Zora Neale Hurston” was published in Ms. Magazine, bringing renewed attention to the literary work of Hurston and introduced her to a new generation of readers.
Hurston’s novels had been out of print for a long time, due to a number of cultural and political reasons including the fact that many readers objected to representation of African-American dialect in her novels. Recently, many critics have praised her use of idiomatic speech. As public interest grew in Hurston and other writers, like Maya Angelou, Toni Morrison and Alice Walker whose works dealt with African-American experiences, new editions of both her novels, and other writings were published including an anthology entitled I Love Myself When I Am Laughing…And Then Again When I Am Looking Mean and Impressive (1979). As further interest in her grew, other collections of her work were published including Spunk: The Selected Stories (1985), The Complete Stories (1995), and Every Tongue Got to Confess (2001), a collection of folktales from the South. In addition to this, in 1995 the Library of America published a two-volume set of her work in its series.
Hurston’s house in Fort Pierce is now a National Historic Landmark, and the city celebrates her annually with events like Zora Fest. In 2002, Hurston was listened on scholar Molefi Kete Asante’s list of 100 Greatest African Americans, and in 2010 she was inducted as a member of the inaugural class of the New York Writers Hall of Fame. In 2015, she was one of twelve inaugural inductees to the Alabama Writers Hall of Fame. Hurston has heavily influenced many other writers, in addition to Alice Walker, including Toni Morrison, Ralph Ellison and many others.