Zora Neale Hurston

Zora Neale Hurston was an American writer, anthropologist, folklorist, and documentary filmmaker whose work grew out of the early-20th-century American South, the Harlem Renaissance, and her own life as an African-American woman. She was born on January 7, 1891, in Notasulga, Alabama, the fifth of eight children of John Hurston and Lucy Ann Hurston. All four of her grandparents had been born into slavery. Her father was a Baptist preacher and sharecropper who later became a carpenter, and her mother was a school teacher.

When Hurston was three, her family moved to Eatonville, Florida, one of the first all-black towns incorporated in the United States. She later treated Eatonville as home and used it as the setting for many of her stories. It was a place where African Americans could live independent of white society, and that experience shaped the confidence and detail of her fiction. In 1901, visiting northern school teachers gave her books that opened her mind to literature. Her mother died in 1904, and after her father remarried, Hurston was sent to a Baptist boarding school in Jacksonville, Florida, but was dismissed when her tuition was no longer paid.

Before returning to school, Hurston worked at different times as a maid for white families, as a receptionist in a doctor’s office, and as a live-in maid for her brother Bob. In 1916, she worked as a maid for the lead singer of a touring Gilbert & Sullivan theatrical company. In 1917, she resumed her formal education at Morgan Academy in Baltimore, now Morgan State University, and graduated from high school in 1918. She then studied at Howard University, where she was a first-generation college student, joined Zeta Phi Beta, co-founded The Hilltop, and published early short stories through Howard’s literary circles.

Hurston’s training as a scholar became central to her art. In 1925, she received a scholarship to Barnard College of Columbia University and became the first African-American admitted to that women’s college. She studied anthropology, conducted ethnographic research with Franz Boas, and also worked with Ruth Benedict and fellow anthropology student Margaret Mead. She earned her B.A. in anthropology in 1928. Her interests centered on African-American and Caribbean folklore and on how those traditions contributed to community identity.

Hurston became a central figure of the Harlem Renaissance and wrote about contemporary issues in the black community. Her short satires appeared in anthologies such as The New Negro and Fire!!. After moving back to Florida, she published Mules and Men in 1935, a literary anthology of African-American folklore in North Florida, and three novels: Jonah’s Gourd Vine in 1934, Their Eyes Were Watching God in 1937, and Moses, Man of the Mountain in 1939. She also published Tell My Horse: Voodoo and Life in Haiti and Jamaica in 1938, documenting her research on rituals in Jamaica and Haiti.

Hurston died on January 28, 1960. For decades, her novels went relatively unrecognized by the literary world, but interest in her work grew again after Alice Walker published “In Search of Zora Neale Hurston” in Ms. magazine in 1975. Later posthumous publications added to readers’ understanding of her range: Every Tongue Got to Confess, a collection of folktales gathered in the 1920s, appeared in 2001 after being found in the Smithsonian archives, and Barracoon: The Story of the Last “Black Cargo” was published in 2018. Her words continue to matter because they carry the speech, memory, humor, pain, and self-knowledge of communities she knew, studied, and portrayed with rare attention.