Author Profile: Zora Neale Hurston

Zora Neale Hurston

BIO

Zora Neale Hurston is probably best known today as the author of THEIR EYES WERE WATCHING GOD (1937) and as one of the most prolific participants in the Harlem Renaissance. Despite the many obstacles she endured, Hurston attempted to live her life to the fullest. Like many African-American women, she wore many hats. She was not only a novelist, folklorist and anthropologist, she was also an essayist and playwright. She knew how to have a good time and shocked many (while delighting others) by "being herself" and living her life as she pleased.

"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. I do not belong to the sobbing school of Negrohood who hold that nature somehow has given them a lowdown dirty deal and whose feelings are all hurt about it. ...No, I do not weep at the world--I am too busy sharpening my oyster knife." --- From "How It Feels To Be Colored Me," World Tomorrow, 1928

Zora was born in the all-black town of Eatonville, Florida on January 7, 1891. Her mother Lucy Potts Hurston, a former schoolteacher, died when Zora was a child. Her father John Hurston was a carpenter and Baptist preacher. Zora was the fifth child of John and Lucy's eight children.

Zora had a rocky relationship with her family and left Eatonville in 1917 to attend Morgan Academy in Baltimore and complete her high school requirements. She went on to Howard Prep School and Howard University and earned an associates degree. She completed her undergraduate education at Barnard College and studied under the well- known anthropologist Franz Boas.

While in New York, Hurston become a part of the Harlem Renaissance's literati and hung out with folks like Langston Hughes, Wallace Thurman and Jessie Fauset. She termed the black literati the "niggerati." She became well-known not only for her writing but for her outspokenness, her distinct way of dress and her refusal to be ashamed of her culture. Ironically, several members of the "niggerati" harshly criticized Zora for "being herself." Like many other Black artists of the period, Zora received funds from white patrons and philanthropical organizations to do her work. She was very adept in her quest for funds. But to some of her contemporaries, this was just another reason to criticize her even though many of them relied on the same patrons and organizations for their livelihood.

Zora was a pioneer in the study of African-American folklore. For her folklore writings, she traveled back home "down South," to the Caribbean and Latin America. Her most active years were the 1930s and early 1940s. During that time she:

�was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship
�joined the Federal Writers Project in Florida
�published four novels and an autobiography
�worked as a story consultant for Paramount Pictures

During the late 1940s, Zora began to publish less and less. It was not that she did not produce work, but her work was rejected with increasing frequency and she had to find other ways to "make a living." For a while in 1950, she worked as a maid in Rivo Island, Florida. During that period she published an article in the Saturday Evening Post.

She moved to Belle Glade, Florida in late 1950. She continued to write and publish including another article in the Saturday Evening Post. However, her finances and health faltered. Like many artists who were before their time, Zora lived her last few years in relative obscurity. In 1959 she suffered a stroke and had to enter the St. Lucie County Welfare home. She died there penniless January 28, 1960 and was buried in an unmarked grave in a segregated cemetery in Fort Pierce.

In 1973, writer Alice Walker discovered her grave and put a gravemarker on the site. Walker published the essay "In Search of Zora Neale Hurston" in Ms. magazine in March 1975 and resurrected the literary world's interest in Zora. That essay and Walker's "Zora Neale Hurston: A Cautionary Tale and a Partisan View" are published in IN SEARCH OF OUR MOTHERS' GARDENS (Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1983). Zora's novels, autobiography and other works have been reprinted by Harper & Row for the Perennial Library Series. Since 1989, there has been an annual festival in her honor in Eatonville. Zora lives on.

ARTICLE

Zora Neale Hurston was born in 1901.  She grew up in the small, all Black town of Eatonville, Florida, a community which shaped both her life and her writing.  Several of her books are set in communities very similar to Eatonville, and the characters closely resemble the friends and neighbors she knew well.

She moved to New York and became part of the Harlem Renaissance which included writers such as Langston Hughes, Dorothy West, and Richard Wright.

Her first published book, Jonah's Gourd Vine, was set in a small Florida town and focused on the lives of two people quite similar to her parents.  It is the story of the rise and fall of a powerful preacher torn between the spirit and the flesh.  THEIR EYES WERE WATCHING GOD, perhaps her most important book, again set in a small all-black town, tells the story of Janie Crawford who defines her life against the traditions of the town.  MOSES, MAN OF THE MOUNTAIN, is a compelling rewriting of the book of Exodus.

Although her work was quite popular for a number of years, she was unable to make a living with her writing.  She worked, in her later years, as a teacher, a librarian and as a maid.  She died in 1960, in a welfare home, and was buried in an unmarked grave.  Her work was rediscovered in the late 1960's, and in 1973 Alice Walker found her grave and placed a gravestone on it.

She was the most prolific African-American writer of her time, and her novels are compelling in their complexity and imagery.

--- Judith Handschuh