Zora Neale Hurston

Zora Neale Hurston
Carl Van Vechten · Public domain · source
Name	Zora Neale Hurston
Caption	Hurston in 1935
Birth date	January 7, 1891
Birth place	Notasulga, Alabama, U.S.
Death date	January 28, 1960
Death place	Fort Pierce, Florida, U.S.
Occupation	Author, anthropologist, folklorist
Education	Howard University (AA), Barnard College (BA)
Notableworks	Their Eyes Were Watching God, Mules and Men, Dust Tracks on a Road
Movement	Harlem Renaissance

Zora Neale Hurston. Zora Neale Hurston was a seminal African-American author, anthropologist, and key figure of the Harlem Renaissance. Her work celebrated Southern African-American culture and Black women's experiences, offering a vital, complex perspective often at odds with mainstream civil rights movement politics. Though her legacy was complicated by her political views, she is now recognized as a foundational voice in American literature and Black feminism.

Early life and education

Zora Neale Hurston was born in 1891 in Notasulga, Alabama, but her family moved to Eatonville, Florida when she was a toddler. Eatonville was one of the first all-Black towns incorporated in the United States, and its self-governed, vibrant community profoundly shaped Hurston’s worldview and later literary focus. After her mother’s death and a difficult period in her youth, she worked various jobs before enrolling at Morgan Academy in Baltimore. Her academic journey continued at the historically Black Howard University, where she co-founded the student newspaper The Hilltop and began publishing short stories. Her talent attracted the attention of influential figures, leading to a scholarship at Barnard College in New York City, where she studied anthropology under the renowned Franz Boas, becoming the college's first Black graduate in 1928.

Literary career and the Harlem Renaissance

Hurston became a central, if sometimes controversial, literary voice during the Harlem Renaissance, a flourishing of Black artistic and intellectual life in the 1920s and 1930s. She was a vibrant presence in Harlem, associating with figures like Langston Hughes, Countee Cullen, and Wallace Thurman. Her early short stories, such as "Spunk," and plays captured the dialect and rhythms of Black Southern life. Her major novels include Jonah's Gourd Vine (1934) and her masterpiece, Their Eyes Were Watching God (1937), a seminal work of Black feminism that centers the emotional and spiritual journey of a Black woman, Janie Crawford, in the Florida Everglades. While celebrated for her rich use of African-American Vernacular English and focus on Black self-determination, her work was sometimes criticized by contemporaries like Richard Wright for not focusing explicitly on racial politics and segregation.

Anthropological work and folklore studies

Trained as an anthropologist, Hurston conducted extensive fieldwork throughout the American South and the Caribbean, documenting African-American folklore, music, and oral traditions. Funded by fellowships from the American Folklore Society and patrons like Charlotte Osgood Mason, she collected stories, songs, and cultural practices, arguing for their intrinsic value and sophistication. Her anthropological works, including Mules and Men (1935) and Tell My Horse (1938), which explored Vodou in Haiti and Jamaica, presented Black folk culture from an insider’s perspective. This research directly informed her fiction, blending academic study with literary artistry to preserve and elevate the cultural expressions of the African diaspora.

Political views and stance on civil rights

Hurston’s political views placed her in stark opposition to the prevailing integrationist strategies of the mid-20th century civil rights movement. A staunch conservative and individualist, she opposed the 1954 ''Brown v. Board of Education'' decision, viewing federally mandated desegregation as an insult to Black-run institutions like those in her hometown of Eatonville. She criticized figures like W. E. B. Du Bois and the NAACP, and supported Republican Senator Robert Taft. Her 1955 essay "Court Order Can't Make the Races Mix" articulated her belief in self-reliance over what she saw as patronizing white liberal salvation. These views, coupled with false later-life morals charges, led to her marginalization by the Black literary and political establishment.

Later years and legacy

Despite early success, Hurston struggled financially and professionally in her later years. She worked as a maid, a librarian, and a substitute teacher, and lived in modest circumstances in Fort Pierce, Florida. She continued writing, including her controversial autobiography Dust Tracks on a Road (1942), but published little. She died in 1960 in relative obscurity and was buried in an unmarked grave. Her legacy was resurrected in the 1970s, largely due to the efforts of author Alice Walker, who published the essay "In Search of Zora Neale Hurston" in Ms. in 1975. Walker located and marked Hurston’s grave, sparking a major scholarly and popular revival. Today, Hurston is celebrated as a literary iconography, a pioneer of Black feminism and African-American literature, and a visionary chronicler of Black life, with her works, especially Their Eyes Were Watching God, holding a central place in the American literary canon. Her papers are held at the University of Florida and the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.