Born: January 7, 1891, Notasulga, Alabama, U.S.
Died: January 28, 1960, Fort Pierce, Florida
Zora Neale Hurston was an American writer and folklorist, whose anthropological study of her racial heritage, at a time when black culture was not a popular field of study, influenced the Harlem Renaissance writers of the 1930s. Hurston’s work also had an impact on later black American authors such as Ralph Ellison, Alice Walker, and Toni Morrison.
Born in Notasulga, Alabama, and raised from an early age in Eatonville, Florida, Hurston was educated at Howard University, at Barnard College, and at Columbia University, where she studied under German American anthropologist Franz Boas. Eatonville was the first incorporated all-black town in the United States, and Hurston returned there after college for anthropological field study that influenced her later output in fiction as well as in folklore. Hurston also collected folklore in Jamaica, Haiti, Bermuda, and Honduras. Mules and Men (1935), one of her best-known folklore collections, was based on her field research in the American South. Tell My Horse (1938) described folk customs in Haiti and Jamaica.
As a fiction writer, Hurston is noted for her metaphorical language, her story-telling abilities, and her interest in and celebration of Southern black culture in the United States. Her best-known novel is Their Eyes Were Watching God (1937), in which she tracked a Southern black woman’s search, over 25 years and 3 marriages, for her true identity and a community in which she can develop that identity. Hurston’s prolific literary output also includes such novels as Jonah’s Gourd Vine (1934) and Seraph on the Suwanee (1948); short stories; plays; journal articles; and an autobiography, Dust Tracks on a Road (1942). Hurston’s work was not political, but her characters’ use of dialect, her manner of portraying black culture, and her conservatism created controversy within the black community. Throughout her career she addressed issues of race and gender, often relating them to the search for freedom.
In her later years Hurston experienced health problems, and she died impoverished and unrecognized by the literary community. Her writings, however, were rediscovered in the 1970s by a new generation of black writers, notably Alice Walker, and many of Hurston’s works were republished. In 1995, a two-volume set of her fiction and non-fiction writings was published. Go Gator and Muddy the Water: Writings by Zora Neale Hurston from the Federal Writers’ Project appeared in 1999. Hurston wrote this collection of articles on the folklore of African American Floridians for the Florida Federal Writers’ Project between 1938 and 1939. The 1995 and 1999 collections contain previously unpublished work.
