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Zora Neale Hurston was a celebrated writer of the Harlem Renaissance, known for her novel Their Eyes Were Watching God. She influenced writers such as Alice Walker, Tony Morrison, and Maya Angelou. Hurston’s childhood in an all-black town in Florida was different from many others, and she craved an education. She became a key member of the Harlem Renaissance, publishing Fire!! with Langston Hughes and Wallace Thurman. Hurston’s anthropological work led to her next work of fiction, Moses, Man of the Mountain. She died in relative obscurity but was later recognized as an important voice in African-American literature.
Zora Neale Hurston (1891-1960) is one of the most celebrated writers of the Harlem Renaissance. As a writer, she has been posthumously recognized not only as a female or African-American writer, but simply as a fantastic writer who has well earned her place in the Literary Canon. Her most famous work is the novel Their Eyes Were Watching God, but she was prolific, composing many other novels, plays, her autobiography, and numerous short stories and essays.
Alice Walker, Tony Morrison and Maya Angelou all cite Zora Neale Hurston as a tremendous influence on their careers. In fact, Walker loved Hurston so much that she made significant efforts to find her unmarked grave and purchase a headstone for it. Hurston surely deserves the admiration of these other writers because her work represents significant scholarship and a strong understanding of anthropology. She continues to resonate with the modern reader.
Zora Neale Hurston’s early childhood was spent in Eatonville, Florida, an all-black small town. Hurston was probably born in Alabama, but her family moved to Florida when she was about three years old. Her father was a minister and her mother taught school, while she raised eight children. Hurston recalls her early years in Eatonville as good, for her experience as a black child growing up in the South is markedly different from many others because the city was not subject to significant white discrimination. In fact, he saw her success all around her, allowing her to feel that she could achieve her dreams.
Life changed dramatically for Zora Neale Hurston when her mother passed away. Hurston was only 13 and became persona non grata when her father quickly remarried a woman she disliked. Lei Hurston began working various jobs, eventually joining a Gilbert & Sullivan touring company, first as a waitress and then as a singer. However, she craved an education, which was cut short by the death of her mother. Back in high school, she claimed to be ten years younger than her real age and she started attending Morgan Academy, where she received her high school diploma. She then attended Howard University before finishing her graduate work at Barnard University in anthropology in 1927.
Before finishing his degree, Hurston became a key member of the Harlem Renaissance and a collaborator of Langston Hughes and Wallace Thurman. The three published the literary magazine Fire!!. His first novel, Jonah’s Gourd Vine, was published in 1934. Mules and Men followed in 1935, and was a collection of African American folklore. This was followed in 1937 by what many consider his masterpiece, Their Eyes Were Watching God.
Because Zora Neale Hurston was an anthropologist and writer, she continued to pursue anthropological work, traveling to Haiti in 1937 to study the practice of Voodoo. Her studies there led to her next work of fiction, Moses, Man of the Mountain. Many other works followed, including plays, essays, and an autobiography. As a writer, Hurston often chose to write in African-American dialect, which in some ways contributed to her works being considered obscure by her.
While Hurston’s career peaked in the 1940s, his later years were spent in Florida, working in relative obscurity. She wrote as a freelance writer and worked as a substitute teacher. She died with little money (her books by her had seldom brought her much profit) and was buried in an unmarked grave. Her full critical attention to her significant contributions to literature was not paid to her until 1975, when Alice Walker published the article In Search of Zora Neale Hurston. Since then, Walker and others have done much to re-establish Hurston’s work as perhaps one of the most important written 20th-century American literature and an extraordinary voice in African-American literature.
