Zora Neale Hurston

• Born: 7 January 1891
• Birthplace: Notasulga, Alabama
• Died: 28 January 1960
• Best Known As: Author of Their Eyes Were Watching God

Zora Neale Hurston was the flamboyant author of the 1937 novel Their Eyes Were Watching God, and a leading figure in African-American literature of the 20th century. She grew up in Florida, but Hurston made her fame in New York as a writer and well-known participant in the rich cultural scene there in the 1920s and '30s (a period sometimes called the Harlem Renaissance). Hurston studied anthropology at Howard University and Barnard College, and her work as a writer was intertwined with her studies of black folklore of the South. She wrote the novels Jonah's Gourd Vine (1934), Their Eyes Were Watching God (1937) and Moses, Man of the Mountain (1939); she published the studies on folklore Mules and Men (1935) and Tell My Horse (1938); and she published an entertaining -- if not precisely accurate -- autobiography, Dust Tracks on a Road (1942). Despite her fame and reputation in the 1930s, by the time of her death in 1960 Hurston was penniless and nearly forgotten. The emergence of African American and women's studies in the 1970s, as well as the support of other writers (especially Alice Walker), caused renewed interest in Hurston's work and now her books are again widely available.

Their Eyes Were Watching God was made into a TV movie in 2005, starring Halle Berry... Hurston claimed she was born in Eatonville, Florida, but recent biographers cite census records showing she was born in Alabama in 1891... She wrote a play with Langston Hughes called Mule Bone, but it was not published until 1991.

For more information on Zora Neale Hurston, visit Britannica.com.

Zora Neale Hurston (1903-1960), folklorist and novelist, was best known for her collection of African American folklore "Mules and Men" (1935) and her novel "Their Eyes Were Watching God" (1937), in which she charted a young African American woman's journey for personal fulfillment.

Zora Neale Hurston was born on January 7, 1903, in Eatonville, Florida, to Reverend John and Lucy Hurston. Zora's mother died when she was nine years old, and her father soon remarried. Her relationship with her stepmother rapidly deteriorated, and her father sent her to school in Jacksonville. In her early teens she became a wardrobe girl in a Gilbert and Sullivan repertory company touring the South. Eighteen months later she enrolled in Morgan Academy in Baltimore in 1917. She graduated a year later and went to Howard University, where she completed a year and a half of course work between 1919 and 1924. She secured a scholarship which allowed her to transfer to Barnard College, where she earned her B.A. in 1928. From 1928 to 1932 she studied anthropology and folklore at Columbia University under Franz Boas, the renown anthropologist. In 1936 she was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship for travelling and collecting folklore in Haiti and the British West Indies.

Hurston worked at a variety of jobs, from manicurist, to Fannie Hurst's secretary, to writer for Paramount and Warner Brothers Studios, to librarian at the Library of Congress, to drama coach at North Carolina College for Negroes. Hurston began her writing career while at Howard when she wrote her first short story for Stylus, a college literary magazine. She continued to write stories, and in 1925 won first prize in the Opportunity literary contest for "Spunk." In 1939 Morgan College awarded her an honorary doctorate. In 1943 she received the Annisfield Award for the autobiographical Dust Tracks on the Road; also in 1943 Howard University bestowed its alumni award upon her.

Although Hurston worked all of her life at many jobs and was a prolific writer, money was always a serious problem. In the late 1940s she returned to Florida and worked as a maid in Riva Alto. After several efforts to re-kindle her writing career, she died in poverty in the town of her birth.

Hurston's most famous work is her novel Their Eyes Were Watching God (1937), in which she created the portrait of an African American female, Janie, growing into adulthood searching for her identity and fulfillment. Through a series of marriages Janie comes to know and define herself in terms of her relationship with whites. For several years after the novel's publication critics saw this work as a sentimental love story. However, if the novel is read with the understanding that love was the traditional way in which a woman was supposed to find fulfillment, then love can be seen as the vehicle for emotional, spiritual, and intellectual development. The novel also portrays the awakening of a woman's sexuality. With the advent of the women's movement of the 1970s and the subsequent growth of female awareness, many critics cited this novel as the central text in the canon of literature by African American women writers, specifically, and by women writers in general.

Hurston was also a famous folklorist who applied her academic training to collecting African American folklore around her hometown in Florida. This work produced two collections of folklore, Mules and Men (1935) and Tell My Horse (1939). All of her work is characterized by her use of African American folk idioms, which are intrinsic to her character portrayals.

Hurston wrote three other novels: Jonah's Gourd Vine (1934), an autobiographical novel about her father's rise from an illiterate laborer to become a respected Baptist minister; Moses, Man of the Mountain (1939), which recreated Mosaic biblical myth in an African context; and Seraph on the Suwanee (1948), which is about a woman's search for selfhood within the confines of marriage to a man who sees all women as inferior.

Hurston also wrote several plays: Fast and Furious (1931), The First One (1927), Mule Bone: A Comedy of Negro Life in Three Acts (1931), and Polk County (1944), as well as many articles and short stories.

Further Reading

Hurston tells her life story in the autobiography Dust Tracks on the Road (1942, 1985). For the best critical biographical source see Robert Hemenway, Zora Neale Hurston: A Literary Biography (1977). Barbara Christian summarized Hurston's career and placed her in the context of her female contemporaries in Black Women Novelists (1980). Also see Daryl C. Dance, "Zora Neale Hurston," in American Women Writers: Bibliographical Essays, edited by Maurice Duke, et al.; Quandra P. Stadler, "Visibility and Difference: Black Women in History and Literature: Pieces of a Paper and Some Ruminations," in The Future of Difference (1980), edited by Alice Jardine. See also citations for Hurston in Black American Writers Past and Present, edited by Theressa G. Rush, et al., and Alice Walker's Hurston reader I Love Myself When I'm Laughing … for Hurston's posthumously published essay. Spunk: The Selected Short Stories of Zora Neale Hurston was published in 1985.

writer; anthropologist; folklorist

Personal Information

Born January 7, 1891, in Eatonville, FL; died of heart disease, January 28, 1960, in Fort Pierce, FL; daughter of John (a carpenter, reverend, and mayor) and Lucy Ann (a teacher and seamstress; maiden name, Potts) Hurston; married Herbert Sheen (a doctor), May 19, 1927 (divorced, 1931); married Albert Price III, June 27, 1939 (divorced, 1943).
Education: Attended Howard University Prep School, 1918-19; Howard University, A.A., 1924; Barnard College, B.A., 1928; graduate study at Columbia University.
Memberships: American Folklore Society, American Anthropological Society, American Ethnological Society, Zeta Phi Beta.

Career

Published first story, 1921; assistant to writer Fannie Hurst, 1925-26; collected folklore in the South, 1927-31; taught drama at Bethune-Cookman College, Daytona, FL, 1933-34; collected conjure lore in Jamaica, Haiti, and Bermuda, 1936-38; collected folklore in Florida for the Works Progress Administration, 1938-39; drama instructor at North Carolina College for Negroes at Durham (now North Carolina Central University), 1939; story consultant for Paramount Studios, Hollywood, CA, 1941-42; conducted folklore fieldwork in Honduras, 1947-48; employed as a maid in Rivo Island, FL, 1950; free-lance writer, 1950-56; librarian at Patrick Air Force Base, FL, 1956-57; substitute teacher at Lincoln Park Academy, Fort Pierce, FL, 1958-59.

Life's Work

Zora Neale Hurston managed to avoid many of the restraints placed upon women, blacks, and specifically black artists by American society during the first half of the twentieth century. And she did so with a vengeance by becoming the most published black female author in her time and arguably the most important collector of African-American folklore ever. Hurston was a complex artist whose persona ranged from charming and outrageous to fragile and inconsistent, but she always remained a driven and brilliant talent.

One of eight children, Hurston was born in the idyllic setting of a town in central Florida named Eatonville. Eatonville was incorporated in 1886 as the first self-governed, all-black city in America. In her folklore classic Mules and Men, Hurston describes Eatonville as "a city of five lakes, three croquet courts, three hundred brown skins, three hundred good swimmers, plenty guavas, two schools, and no jail house," as well as the home of Joe Clarke's store porch. The porch became a stage as neighbors sat around on milk crates skillfully transforming simple gossip into folktales. Eatonville was a nurturing environment that provided a black child with rich traditions and a pride and joy in being black. The Hurstons built a comfortable home on five acres of lush land dotted with tropical fruit trees. The place was overrun with boisterous, barefoot children, and the young Zora was probably the loudest of them all. Lucy Ann Hurston, a former country school teacher, was delighted with her daughter's spiritedness. As Zora wrote in her autobiography, Dust Tracks on a Road: "Mama exhorted her children at every opportunity to 'jump at the sun.' We might not land on the sun, but at least we would get off the ground." Her father did not see it that way. "It did not do for Negroes to have too much spirit," he counseled, as related in Zora's autobiography. "The white folks were not going to stand for it."

A carpenter, three-term mayor, and moderator of the South Florida Baptist Association, Zora's father, Reverend John Hurston, was a well-respected man and--according to wisdom gathered on Joe Clarke's porch--the strongest and bravest man in the community. Reverend Hurston's words to his daughter were cautionary: the rest of the world was not like Eatonville. But it was the rest of the world that the child hungered for. As she recounted in her autobiography, one of her favorite pastimes was to sit atop a gatepost hailing down passing cars and impishly asking, "Don't you want me to go a piece of the way with you?"

Hurston was only nine when her mother died. It was a traumatic experience, one that strained the relationship between her and her father. Two weeks after her mother's death she was sent off to school in Jacksonville, Florida; her father quickly remarried. Hurston despised her stepmother and became even more estranged from her father, who reacted by requesting--unsuccessfully--that the school adopt his daughter.

By the age of 14, Hurston was on her own. She held a number of jobs as a domestic before being hired as the personal maid to a cast member of a traveling Gilbert and Sullivan troupe. The actors welcomed her into their family, and the 18 months she spent with them would be among her fondest memories.

With a new sense of worldliness, Hurston left the troupe in Baltimore, Maryland, and enrolled into the high school division of Morgan Academy (now Morgan State University). She graduated early and set her sights on the prestigious Howard University. Working as a waitress and as a manicurist in a black-owned, whites-only barbershop, Hurston managed to scrape together the tuition to enter Howard in 1918.

Hurston embraced college life. She excelled in classes she found interesting and failed in those she did not; she worshipped her teachers; and she fell in love. The target of her affection was Herbert Sheen, a fellow student who would go on to medical school. They eventually married in 1927, only to divorce two years later when their careers came between them.

In 1921 Hurston published her first story. "John Redding Goes to Sea" was accepted by Howard's distinguished literary-club magazine. Though the story is considered a naively written and overly dramatic saga, it was the necessary first step for the blossoming young writer. In Zora Neale Hurston: A Literary Biography, Robert E. Hemenway wrote, "Hurston was struggling to make literature out of the Eatonville experience. It was her unique subject, and she was encouraged to make it the source of her art."

By 1925 her struggle was beginning to pay off. At an awards dinner sponsored by Opportunity: A Journal of Negro Life, a National Urban League magazine, Hurston came away with second-place prizes for an Eatonville story and play, and she caught the interest of leading figures in what would be known as the Harlem Renaissance. The connections she made at that dinner opened doors. That year she moved to New York City, began a job as a personal assistant to famed novelist Fannie Hurst, and entered Barnard College on scholarship as its first and only black student.

The time was the Roaring Twenties. Sandwiched between the beginning of World War II and the Great Depression of 1930, the 1920s was America's carefree era. It was the Jazz Age, Charleston was the dance, and Prohibition was for many only an inconvenience whose remedy was speakeasy social clubs. For black Americans, the 1920s was also an era of extremes. While the Ku Klux Klan was reviving a campaign of terror in the North, South, and Midwest, New York City was in the midst of the Harlem Renaissance, a movement marking the emergence of numerous notable black writers. Hemenway wrote that for some, "Harlem became an aphrodisiac, a place where whites could discover their primitive selves." But the Harlem Renaissance was not merely a white fad. It is regarded as a spiritual revolution born in the cultural capital of black America, exploring and celebrating the African-American heritage.

Joining the likes of Jean Toomer, Alain Locke, Countie Cullen, and her friend Langston Hughes, Hurston became one of the "New Negroes." They were the young black intellectuals who demanded equal billing for African-American culture in American history. But many thought Hurston to hold a special status. As a product of a community with a thriving black folk life and as a talented young writer who would celebrate that culture through her art, she is said to have personified the movement and was dubbed the "Queen of the Renaissance."

Hurston's celebrity status grew easily. In a room full of people, she reportedly could draw an audience to her like a magnet. She used storytelling techniques that the masters on Joe Clarke's porch would have been proud of and brought to life the tragicomic Eatonville stories that became known as "Zora stories." But her popularity drew some criticism too. A writer for the Washington Post noted, "Among her faults, her peers felt, [was] a dependence on whites for approval." The Washington Post writer went on to quote Langston Hughes: "To many of her white friends, no doubt, she was the perfect 'darkie' in the nice meaning they give the term--that is, naive, childlike, sweet, humorous and highly colored Negro.... But, Miss Hurston was clever too."

In 1928 Hurston answered her critics in an essay entitled "How It Feels to be Colored Me." In it she wrote: "I am not tragically colored. There is no great sorrow dammed up in my soul.... I do not belong to that sobbing school of Negrohood who hold that nature somehow has given them a lowdown dirty deal.... No, I do not weep at the world--I am too busy sharpening my oyster knife."

After receiving a B.A. from Barnard, Hurston began graduate work at Columbia University under the tutelage of Franz Boas, the foremost anthropologist in America. She continued writing and seeing her short stories published in literary magazines, but her interest was shifting to anthropology. Boas was encouraging: he saw Hurston as a natural candidate to help fill the void in the study of African-American culture.

Hurston's first folklore collecting trip to America's South was unfruitful, but it was only a false start to a decade of field work that would prove rewarding. The trip also directed the budding anthropologist to a largely unexplored and exciting subject: voodoo. Funded by Guggenheim fellowships and by her long-term relationship with a wealthy New York City patron, Hurston spent the next decade researching black folklore in the South and tracking conjure lore--a quest that took her from New Orleans, Louisiana, to Jamaica, and finally Haiti, where she photographed an apparent zombie.

The secret of Hurston's success as a collector was her genuine respect and growing belief in the voodoo religion. As an initiate in the field, Hurston was included in sophisticated rites that would have been off limits to most anthropologists. In 1938 she painstakingly documented her experiences in Jamaica and Haiti in Tell My Horse. In the book's foreword, novelist and poet Ishmael Reed noted, "Her greatest accomplishment is in revealing the profound beauty and appeal of a faith older than Christianity, Buddhism, and Islam, a faith that has survived in spite of its horrendously bad reputation and the persecution of its followers."

Two other books resulted from Hurston's days on the road. Her work of folklore, Mules and Men, focuses on her excursions to the South and is regarded as the best and most important book of its kind. Its pages are filled with what many consider the integral ingredients of America's black culture: stories, or "big old lies," songs, superstitions, and even "formulae of Hoodoo Doctors."

But Hurston's masterpiece and the book she is most identified with is her novel Their Eyes Were Watching God, the jewel that Hurston cut from her Eatonville experience. It is the story of a young black woman, Janie, following her through three very different relationships and her transformation into a self-sufficient, whole human being. In the novel Janie learns that there are "two things everybody's got tuh do fuh theyselves. They got tuh go tuh God, and they got tuh find about livin' fuh theyselves." It is a novel of affirmation. Writer Alice Walker is quoted on its cover: "There is no book more important to me than this one."

While the 1930s and 1940s brought Hurston her greatest professional successes, they didn't come without a price. In 1931 a bitter breakdown of Hurston's friendship with Langston Hughes occurred. Their relationship was the victim of a series of misunderstandings over the authorship of a play. The two had been collaborating on what they believed to be the first true Negro comedy. Mule Bone: A Comedy of Negro Life was finally dusted off and produced on Broadway in 1991--and immediately caused controversy. The play was another Eatonville story; the setting was Joe Clarke's store porch; and the dialect was authentic.

To many blacks who worried about their perception in today's society, the play's use of Southern black dialect was embarrassing and even offensive. In its defense, Dr. Henry Louis Gates, Jr., wrote in the New York Times, "By using the vernacular tradition as the basis of their play--indeed, as the basis of a new theory of black drama--Hurston and Hughes sought to create a work that would undo a century of racist representations of black people." Though Mule Bone was not a typical Broadway hit, it is said to have earned its place in American history.

In 1948, living in New York City and in her late fifties, Hurston was arrested on charges of molesting a young boy. The case was thrown out of court but not before the black press ran it as a front-page scandal. Hurston's spirit was scarred by the false accusation, but she persevered, continuing to work with her characteristic zeal. In 1950 she moved to Fort Pierce, Florida, and took on a series of jobs, among them a librarian, maid, and substitute teacher. She also wrote political essays for the Saturday Evening Post and American Legion Magazine. Impoverished--a now familiar circumstance--overweight, and weak, she nevertheless was pursuing her publisher about a book in progress. In 1959 she suffered a stroke and was forced to move into a welfare home.

The author of seven books and more than fifty articles and short stories, a playwright and traveler, and an anthropologist and folklorist, the "Queen of the Renaissance" died quietly in the welfare home on January 28, 1960. In 1973 Alice Walker made a pilgrimage to Fort Pierce and placed a tombstone on the site she guessed to be Hurston's unmarked grave. The stone was inscribed: "Zora Neale Hurston, A Genius of the South."

Awards

Guggenheim Fellowship, 1936 and 1938; Litt.D. from Morgan State College, 1939; Anisfield-Wolf Book Award in Race Relations, 1943; Howard University's Distinguished Alumni Award, 1943; Bethune-Cookman College Award for Education and Human Relations.

Works

Writings

• Jonah's Gourd Vine (novel), Lippincott, 1934, reprinted, Harper & Row, 1990.
• Mules and Men (folklore), Lippincott, 1935, reprinted, Harper & Row, 1990.
• Their Eyes Were Watching God (novel), Lippincott, 1937, reprinted, University of Illinois Press, 1978, reprinted, Harper & Row, 1990.
• Tell My Horse (voodoo research), Lippincott, 1938, reprinted, Turtle Island Foundation, 1981, reprinted, Harper & Row, 1990.
• Moses, Man of the Mountain (novel), Lippincott, 1939, reprinted, University of Illinois Press, 1984.
• Dust Tracks on a Road (autobiography), Lippincott, 1942, reprinted, HarperCollins, 1991.
• Mule Bone: A Comedy of Negro Life (play), HarperCollins, 1991.

Further Reading

Books

• Hemenway, Robert E., Zora Neale Hurston: A Literary Biography, University of Illinois Press, 1977.
• Hurston, Zora Neale, Dust Tracks on a Road (autobiography), Lippincott, 1942.

Periodicals

• Ms., March 1978.
• Miami Herald, August 22, 1976.
• New York Times, June 2, 1978; February 10, 1991.
• Washington Post, April 16, 1978; May 21, 1978.

— Iva Sipal

(1891?-1960), folklorist, anthropologist, and novelist. Outspoken, spirited, and gifted, Hurston was the most prolific African-American woman writer of the 1930s. She was born and raised in all-black Eatonville, Florida, the major shaping influence of her affirmative vision of African-American rural folk culture. Inspired as a child by the advice of her dying mother to "jump at de sun" and to be her mother's voice, she achieved success under the guidance of Franz Boas as a prize-winning folklorist, anthropologist, and writer. Industry, intelligence, ingenuity, and white patrons facilitated her education as a writer and anthropologist at Morgan Academy, Howard University, Barnard College, and Columbia University, where she studied with Boas.

When she arrived in New York in 1925, Hurston's genius for storytelling, drama, and flamboyance helped her make friends quickly. In addition to Boas, the most important were Fannie Hurst, who employed her as a secretary and confidant, Carl Van Vechten, and Charlotte Mason, the patron of several black artists. Much of Hurston's folklore research in the South, the Bahamas, Haiti, and Jamaica was sponsored by these individuals; she also received a Guggenheim Fellowship in 1936.

Hurston drew on the tension between her folk and formal education for the ethnic material and double-voiced manner of short stories and articles that won her acclaim in the 1920s and 1930s. But many black contemporaries of the Harlem Renaissance and depression eras criticized her willingness to play the minstrel role for whites, and some criticized her books for being pastoral and apolitical. Her most controversial political act was to express opposition to the 1954 Supreme Court school desegregation decision, which she resented for portraying southern blacks as inferior to whites. She died in penniless obscurity.

Her literary revival began a decade after her death with poet and novelist Alice Walker's essay "Looking for Zora" (1971), which movingly describes her discovery of Hurston as a literary ancestor. Following the publication in 1977 of Robert Hemenway's Hurston biography, critics reclaimed from literary obscurity her two books of folklore (Mules and Men, 1935, and Tell My Horse, 1938), three romances (Jonah's Gourd Vine, 1934, Their Eyes Were Watching God, 1937, and Moses, Man of the Mountain, 1939), and autobiography (Dust Tracks on a Road, 1942).

More important, literary critics have reassessed Hurston's significance in the canons of European-American, African-American, and women's literatures. Mules and Men and Tell My Horse--the first based on materials collected in Florida and Louisiana, the second on materials gathered in Jamaica and Haiti--are distinctive for the lively, unorthodox manner in which Hurston integrates and dramatizes herself as ethnographer with her black informants, the tales they tell, and the folk culture they live. Both books are important resources for the bicultural belief systems and ritual practices of peoples of African descent in the Americas. Mules and Men provides useful descriptions of hoodoo, and Tell My Horse provides detailed accounts of voodoo.

Hurston's most commercially successful book was Dust Tracks on a Road, though critics agree that its dazzling black idiom and formal rhetoric conceal more than they reveal about the details of her life. Her most critically acclaimed book is Their Eyes Were Watching God. Janie Crawford's quest is the prototypical black love story and account of a woman's search for identity. Its mixture of formal rhetoric and black idiom is poetic without being folksy; its retrospective narrative structure is loose without being disjointed; its dynamic characters are stylized without being exotic; and its romantic quest for personal wholeness and female autonomy is centered on egalitarianism without exploitation in living and loving.

Bibliography:

Robert E. Hemenway, Zora Neale Hurston: A Literary Biography (1977); Karla F. C. Holloway, The Character of the Word: The Texts of Zora Neale Hurston (1987); Alice Walker, In Search of Our Mothers' Gardens: Womanist Prose (1983).

Author:

Bernard W. Bell

See also Harlem Renaissance; Literature.

(1901-1960)

1930	Mule Bone. The two writers collaborate on a dramatic version of Hurston's short story "Bone of Contention," in which two black men quarrel over a woman's affections. Written in black dialect and full of earthy humor and satire, the play would not be produced or published until 1991 due to the writers' disagreements over authorship and finances.
1933	"The Gilded Six-Bits." What is regarded by many as Hurston's finest short story appears in Story. It gains Hurston critical attention, which would help lead to the publication of her first novel, Jonah's Gourd Vine (1934).
1934	Jonah's Gourd Vine. Hurston's first novel concerns a black preacher who is unable to stay faithful to his wife. It features elements from the author's fieldwork in black oral tradition and folklore.
1935	Mules and Men. Considered the first collection of African American folklore compiled by an African American, this is the first and the more important of the author's two folklore collections. Tell My Horse, a collection of Caribbean folktales that includes the first published transcripts of Haitian Creole, would follow in 1938.
1937	Their Eyes Were Watching God. Hurston's masterpiece about the liberation of black woman Janie Crawford to a wider concept of her identity and engagement with the world through three marriages is widely considered the first black feminist novel of the twentieth century.
1939	Moses: Man of the Mountain. This is a retelling of the Exodus story and the myth of Moses as a version of African American experience, which Hurston biographer Robert Hemenway describes as a "noble failure."
1942	Dust Tracks on a Road. This autobiography of the writer, folklorist, and anthropologist traces her career from childhood in an all-black Florida community through her schooling and literary success. The book's factual reliability has been questioned by subsequent biographers.
1948	Seraph on the Suwanee. Hurston's last novel is a melodramatic treatment of a rural Florida family at the beginning of the century. By breaking what she calls "that old silly rule about Negroes not writing about white people," Hurston faces charges that she is abandoning her race. When the book is published, Hurston is falsely accused of molesting a ten-year-old boy. The scandal contributes to Hurston's abandonment of writing and her rapid descent into obscurity.
1979	I Love Myself When I Am Laughing, and Then Again When I Am Looking Mean and Impressive. This collection of selections from Hurston's autobiographical works, folklore, essays, and stories, edited by Alice Walker, stimulates interest in Hurston and her works.

Quotes:

"Grab the broom of anger and drive off the beast of fear."

"Love, I find, is like singing. Everybody can do enough to satisfy themselves, though it may not impress the neighbors as being very much."

"No matter how far a person can go the horizon is still way beyond you."

• Genres: Blues
• Instrument: Engineer, Author

Biography

Zora Neale Hurston was a great American black writer who exists in the relatively docile realm of recording credits due to the folklore and anthropology studies she undertook, in part to gather details for her books. A graduate of Barnard College, Hurston also wrote in great length from her childhood memories of Eatonville, FL, the first fully incorporated black community in the United States, of which her father was the mayor. It was also Florida where Hurston, accompanied by Alan Lomax, discovered a classic blues performer named Gabriel Brown.

In the '40s Brown took part in Polk County, a Hurston production in New York City described by Lomax as "a ballad opera set in a turpentine camp." Hurston is considered one of the key participants in the black cultural movement known as the Harlem Renaissance, which began in the '20s. Short stories were the first material of hers to gain critical attention; her writings have also been excerpted and used by performers in various eras including Clara Smith and Kate Campbell. Hurston's novels include Their Eyes Watching God, Tell My Horse, and Moses, Man of the Mountain. At the time of her death -- and once again the setting is Florida -- she was apparently living in poverty. ~ Eugene Chadbourne, All Music Guide

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