By Shelby Martin

 Born on January 7,  The daughter of two slaves, John Hurston, a pastor, and Lucy Ann [Potts] Hurston.  Father moved the family to Florida when she was very young.  After her mothers death, and her fathers remarriage, she lived with an assortment of family members for the next few years of her life.

 In order to support her finances and gain a good education she worked a variety of jobs, including a job as a maid for an actress in a touring Gilbert and Sullivan group.  In 1920, she earned an associate degree from Harvard university.  A few years after college she moved to New York’s Harlem neighborhood and became a fixture in the area’s thriving art scene.

 She was and anthropologist, an American folklorist, and an author.  From 1925, and on she lived in different parts of New York and joined the Harlem renaissance.  She was one of the shapers of the Black literary and cultural movements of the twenties.  She became the most successful and significant Black writer of the 20 th century.  Over a career that spanned 30 years, she published, four novels, two books of folklore, an autobiography, many short stories, and several essays, articles, and plays.

 On May 1, 1925 at a literary award dinner sponsored by Opportunity magazine, she took home four awards: a second-place fiction prize for her short story “Spunk,” a second-place award in drama for her play “Color Struck,” and two honorable mentions.

 A bibliography  “Jonah’s Gourd Vine” [1934]  “Mules and Men” [1935]  “Tell My Horse” [1937]  “Their Eye’s Were Watching God” [1937]  “Dust Tracks On the Road” [1942]

 She died on January 28, 1960, from a stroke.  Her neighbors in Pierce, Florida, had to take up a collection for her funeral on February 7 th.  They didn’t have enough for a gravestone, so she laid in an unmarked grave until  She died when she was 69.

 “I have the nerve to walk my own way, however hard, in my search for reality, rather than climb upon the rattling wagon if wishful illusions.” –Letter from Zora Neale Hurston to Countee Cullen  “I have been in Sorrow’s kitchen and licked out all the pots. Then I have stood on the peaky mountain wrapped in rainbows, harp and sword in hand.”  “There are years that ask questions and years that answer”

 “I do not weep at the world. I am to busy sharpening my oyster knife.  “Nothing that God ever made is the same thing to more than one person. That is natural”  “No man may make another free”  “It was a weak spot in any nation to have a large body of disaffected people within it’s confusion”  “It’s no use of talking unless people understand what you say”  The man who interprets nature is always held in great honor.”

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