Zora Neale Hurston
Zora Neale Hurston was born on January 7, 1891, in Notasulga, Alabama, and grew up in Eatonville, Florida, the first incorporated all-Black municipality in the United States — a fact of extraordinary significance for her development as a writer. Growing up in a community governed and sustained by Black people, without the constant shadow of white supremacy that shaped daily life across the Jim Crow South, gave Hurston an unusually confident and celebratory relationship to African American culture that would distinguish her work from that of many of her Harlem Renaissance contemporaries. Her mother died when she was thirteen, and after a peripatetic adolescence working as a maid and a wardrobe girl for a traveling theater troupe, she resumed her interrupted education, attending Morgan Academy in Baltimore, Howard University in Washington, and finally Barnard College in New York, where she became the first Black student and where she studied under the pioneering anthropologist Franz Boas.
Under Boas’s influence, Hurston trained as a folklorist and made several extended fieldwork expeditions to the American South and the Caribbean, collecting the African American folk tales, songs, and religious practices that she would later publish in Mules and Men (1935) and Tell My Horse (1938). This anthropological training was inseparable from her literary development: it gave her a scholarly framework for taking seriously and celebrating the cultural forms that she had grown up with, and it equipped her to render African American vernacular speech in her fiction with a precision and love that had no precedent in literature.
Their Eyes Were Watching God, written in seven weeks in Haiti in 1937, is her masterpiece and is now recognized as one of the greatest American novels of the twentieth century. It tells the story of Janie Crawford, a Black woman in early twentieth-century Florida who pursues love and self-determination through three marriages, finding finally with the much younger Tea Cake the passionate, equal partnership she has always sought. The novel is narrated in a voice that moves between third-person narration and the rich vernacular speech of the Black Southern community, and this formal innovation — the literary validation of a speech that had been dismissed as dialect — was itself a political and aesthetic act of the first order.
Hurston’s prose style is lyrical, earthy, and joyful in a way that distinguishes her sharply from the protest tradition of much African American writing of the period. She wrote about Black life from the inside, with celebration as well as clear-eyed honesty, and her refusal to define Black experience primarily through the lens of white oppression made her work controversial among some of her Harlem Renaissance contemporaries, including Richard Wright, who criticized the novel for its apparent political quietism.
Zora Neale Hurston died in poverty on January 28, 1960, in Fort Pierce, Florida, and was buried in an unmarked grave. It was Alice Walker who, in a celebrated 1975 essay, located and marked her grave and championed her work, initiating the critical recovery that has since established Hurston as one of the essential American writers. Their Eyes Were Watching God is now one of the most widely taught novels in American universities and a foundational text of Black feminist literary tradition.
