Zora Neale Hurston

She was born January 7, 1891 in Notasulga, Alabama. She moved to Eatonville, Florida, as a young child. Eatonville was the first incorporated black community in America with a then population of 125

Zora’s father later became mayor of the town. To Zora, Eatonville would become a utopia, glorified in her stories as a place black Americans could live as they desire, independent of white society and all its ways.

Education. Her home life became difficult after the death of her mother. As a result she did not attend high school until she was in her late teens or early twenties. In 1918 she enrolled at Howard University.

"John Redding Goes to Sea," set in Eatonville, was published in the Howard literary magazine The Stylus.  In the following years she contributed several more stories to various magazines.  One of these "Spunk" was published in the black journal Opportunity and caught the attention of such poets as Langston Hughes and Countee Cullen, who were active in a nascent artistic movement called the Harlem Renaissance. 

Anthropologist Hurston transferred to Barnard where she majored in anthropology, the study of cultures and traditions. She combined her studies in anthropology with her literary output writing about African American life and culture as well as short stories. She continued her involvement with the Harlem Renaissance.

Harlem Renaissance. The Harlem Renaissance was a burgeoning of Black Awareness and culture. It featured the development of jazz and black writers such as Countee Cullen and Langston Hughes.

Hurston worked with Hughes on a short lived literary magazine “Fire Hurston worked with Hughes on a short lived literary magazine “Fire!!” and a play. However they fell out over credit for the play.

Throughout her literary career Zora garnered much criticism for her failure to address the subject of racism as meted out by the white American society in her portrayals of black society.  Zora seemed to view the entire world from the perspective of Eatonville, a place that blacks could be sovereign from all of white society, even the segregation that enveloped it as a southern town. 

Zora at Eatonville

She wrote an article in 1950 attacking the right of blacks to vote in the south, charging that votes were being bought.  Then she railed the desegregation ruling in Brown vs. the Board of Education of Topeka, Ks. in 1954, on the grounds that black children do not need to go to school with white children in order to learn; to this many civil right leaders took umbrage

The decline and death of Zora Neale Hurston. Poverty and obscurity marked Zora's last years, during which she worked mostly as a domestic-as she had started out.

Rediscovery. In 1973, novelist Alice Walker saw that Hurston’s gravestone was marked. Two years later, Walker published the article “In Search of Zora Neale Hurston.” The article renewed interest in her work particularly the novel Their Eyes Were Watching God.