Zora Neale Hurston

Early life

Zora Neale Hurston was born on 7 January 1891 in Notasulga, Alabama, to John and Lucy Potts Hurston. When she was about three, the family moved to the all-Black town of Eatonville, Florida, where her father later served as mayor.

Education and the Harlem Renaissance

Hurston studied at Morgan Academy in Baltimore and earned an associate degree from Howard in 1920. Moving to New York, she became one of the distinctive voices of the Harlem Renaissance. She completed a B.A. at Barnard College in 1928 and pursued graduate study at Columbia under the anthropologist Franz Boas, training that informed her work as a folklorist.

Folklorist

Between 1933 and 1939, and again in 1946–48, Hurston collected folklore in the American South and the Caribbean, including Jamaica, Haiti, Bermuda and Honduras. This research, supported by Guggenheim Fellowships in 1936 and 1938, fed the folklore collection Mules and Men (1935) and Tell My Horse (1938). The Library of Congress holds photographs by Alan Lomax showing Hurston collecting songs in Eatonville and Belle Glade, Florida, in 1935, as well as audio recordings made by and of her. In 1939 she joined the Florida Writers' Project of the Works Progress Administration as a folklorist.

Fiction and other work

Her novels include Jonah's Gourd Vine (1934), Their Eyes Were Watching God (1937), Moses, Man of the Mountains (1939) and Seraph on the Suwanee (1948). Her autobiography, Dust Tracks on a Road, appeared in 1942, and she received the Anisfield award in 1943. She also founded a school of dramatic arts at Bethune-Cookman College in 1934, taught at North Carolina College for Negroes, and worked briefly as a staff writer at Paramount Studios in 1941.

Later years and revival

Hurston's later life was marked by hardship. After a stroke she entered a welfare home, and she died on 28 January 1960 at age 69. She was buried in an unmarked grave in a segregated cemetery in Fort Pierce, Florida.

Her reputation was rebuilt largely through the writer Alice Walker, who in 1973 travelled to Fort Pierce, located what is believed to be Hurston's grave and placed a headstone calling her "A Genius of the South." Since then Their Eyes Were Watching God has become a widely taught classic, and Hurston has been inducted into the Florida Artists Hall of Fame (1990) and the first class of the Alabama Writers Hall of Fame (2015). Her papers are held by the University of Florida.