Zora Neale Hurston

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Zora Neale Hurston was born in Notasulga, Alabama, in 1891. In 1892, her family moved to Eatonville, Florida. Her mother died in 1915 and her father quickly remarried.  Zora broke out on her own in 1917 by working as a waitress in Baltimore, Maryland and attending Morgan Academy, which she graduated from one year later. That same year her father died. She enrolled at Howard University in Washington D.C. and worked as a manicurist.  One year after graduating with her Associates degree, she published her first book of short stories.

Zora moved to New York City and became a part of the Harlem Renaissance, a group of black artists. New York provided the opportunities and atmosphere she needed in order to thrive creatively.  She entered and won writing contests; she went to work for author Fannie Hurst; and in 1925 her fiction writing landed her a scholarship to Barnard College.  She then studied anthropology at Columbia University under Franz Boaz.  With Boaz’s help, Hurston was able to win a six-month grant to collect African American folklore.

After college, when Hurston began working as an ethnologist, she combined fiction and her knowledge of culture.  In 1937, Hurston published what would become her best-known and most highly praised work, Their Eyes Were Watching God. The novel created controversy and made people uncomfortable—Zora dared to write outside of the stereotypical, accepted stories by black writers. She was criticized by both blacks and whites.  Blacks felt betrayed because she took funds from white people in order to support her writing.  And her subject was considered too deep into black culture to interest the white community.  Her popularity declined.  Her last book was published in 1948.

She joined the faculty of North Carolina College for Negroes in Durham for a while and she wrote for Warner Brothers motion pictures. She also worked on staff at the Library of Congress, but  eventually, she returned to Florida, where she wrote a series of works as part of the Federal Writers Project.  She died in poverty in 1960, her work virtually forgotten and thus lost to most readers.

But for the efforts of Alice Walker, author of The Color Purple, her works might still be forgotten.  Walker took an interest in reviving Hurston’s novels, and poetry. The world was now ready for her novel, Their Eyes Were Watching God. Most of Hurston’s plays, written between 1925 and 1944, went unpublished and unproduced until 1997 when they were rediscovered in the Copyright Deposit Drama Collection at the United States Copyright Office.

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