Born: January 7, 1891, in Notasulga, Alabama.

Died: January 28, 1960, in Fort Pierce, Florida.

Known For: Poetry, playwrighting, and novels.

Raised in one of the nation’s first incorporated black townships in Eatonville, Florida, she was surrounded by black achievements. Her preacher father, John Hurston, became the mayor of the town. Hurston moved to New York City’s Harlem neighborhood in the 1920s. She became a fixture in Harlem’s thriving art scene by hosting social gatherings in her apartment. Hurston befriended notable members of the Talented Tenth, like Langston Hughes, Countee Cullen, and W. E. B Du Bois. She later launched and contributed short stories and plays to a short-lived literary magazine, Fire!! with leading Harlem Renaissance figures, Wallace Thurman, Gwendolyn Bennett, John P. Davis, Richard Bruce Nugent, Countee Cullen, Lewis Grandison Alexander, and Langston Hughes.

In 1925, Zora Hurston moved to Harlem to pursue a career in writing. She made herself known as a skillful writer when she won the second-place fiction prize for her short story “Spunk,” a second-place award in drama for her play Color Struck, and two honorable mentions at Opportunity magazine’s literary awards dinner. "Spunk" was later published in the famed anthology by Alain Locke, The New Negro( 1925). In the 1930s, she adapted her folklores and anthropological works into plays, with not much acclaim, the plays hardly performed.

Throughout her life, Hurston dedicated herself to promoting and studying black culture and traveled to Jamaica and Haiti to study African diaspora.

Notable Works:

Their Eyes Were Watching God

Publisher: Philadelphia: J.B. Lippincott, 1937.

Their Eyes Were Watching God focuses on the experience of a middle-aged black woman named Janie Crawford in the American south. Her evolving selfhood and self-love through three marriages are depicted in the narrative, with her nanny struggling with the idea of Janie’s budding modern womanhood. This experience of women finding their own identity was familiar but seldomly discussed with a black woman as the protagonist of a novel. Hurston incorporated the raw emotions and sorrows of African American women in her work and symbolically shows that women are worthy emotionally and physically fulfilling love.

Color Struck

Publisher: Fire!! A Quarterly Devoted to Younger Negro Artists in 1926

Color Struck is a play that explores the societal dilemma of Colorism as it operates both intraracially and interracially. The play's protagonist, Emmaline, and her husband John are on a train in Florida when Emma discusses her fear that John would leave her for a lighter-skin girl. Emma's distorted vision and jealousy of her husband portray the idea of color hierarchy and its impact on society. Emma self-deprecates herself because the image of lighter complexation was seen as more powerful and beautiful in society. Hurston projects the social and psychological toll of African American women in the South and Hurston's personal experience with color-consciousness.

A Copy of African American production of Fire!! A Quarterly Devoted to Younger Negro Artists with Zora Neale Hurston's play, Color Struck.

Impact:

Zora Neale Hurston

Courtesy of PhotoQuest

She was known as the “voice of the movement” for her incorporation of black folklore in her works and racial pride by representing blacks as autonomous beings and not focusing on the oppression faced. She often used black Southern vernacular in her plays and novels to convey black dialect and folk speech for a more realistic projection of her character’s development. She published articles in academic journals about black culture that showed parallels in the formation of American culture.

By the mid-1930s, Zora Hurston had published several short stories and the critically acclaimed literary anthropology called Mules and Men, that documented African American folklore. After the publication of Mules and Men, Alain Locke and Richard Wright criticized Hurston’s work as a distraction for white audiences that lacked any political or intellectual backing to the narratives. These remarks never stopped Hurston from preserving Southern black society and rejected conformity. After this, her work began to fall into obscurity and financial hardship.

First edition copy from 1935 of Mules and Men an auto-ethnographic collection of African-American folklore collected and written by anthropologist Zora Neale Hurston from Florida and Louisiana.

Zora Neale Hurston died of heart disease on January 28, 1960, at the St. Lucie County Welfare Home, since she was unable to take care of herself.

Photo courtesy of University of Florida, Gainsville

In 1975, Hurston's anthropological work regained notoriety from the noted black author, Alice Walker. Alice Walker admired the use of Southern dialect in Hurston's writings and how Hurston embraced her upbringing in Eatonville, FL, and black culture through her literature. Alice Walker, who wrote the famous book, The Color Purple, penned an essay in Ms. magazine called "In Search of Zora Neale Hurston," where she encouraged readers to read Hurston's work. Hurston's book, Their Eyes Were Watching God, found a new life on school reading curriculums and recirculation of her other books in different languages, starting filling bookstore shelves. Walker later paid homage to her inspiration by clearing the weeds from Hurston's unmarked grave and placing a headstone that read, "A genius of the South."

"I am not tragically colored. There is no great sorrow dammed up in my soul, nor lurking behind my eyes. I do not mind at all."