Zora Neale Hurston

Zora Neale Hurston 1891?-60, African-American writer, b. Notasulga, Ala. She grew up in the pleasant all-black town of Eatonville, Fla. and, moving north, graduated from Barnard College, where she studied with Franz Boas . Her placid childhood and privileged academic background are often cited as major reasons for her work's general lack of stress on racism, a characteristic so unlike such contemporaries as Richard Wright . An anthropologist and folklorist, Hurston collected African-American folktales in the rural South and sympathetically interpreted them in the collections Mules and Men (1935) and Tell My Horse (1938). A third volume of tales, Every Tongue Got to Confess, was discovered in manuscript and published in 2001. Hurston, a significant figure in the Harlem Renaissance , was also the author of four novels including Jonah's Gourd Vine (1934) and the influential Their Eyes Were Watching God (1937). Her plays include the comedy Mule Bone (1931), written in collaboration with her friend Langston Hughes .

Bibliography: See her autobiography (1942); C. Kaplan, ed., Zora Neale Hurston: A Life in Letters (2002); biographies by R. E. Hemenway (1977) and V. Boyd (2002); studies by H. Bloom, ed. (1986), S. Glassman and K. L. Seidel (1991), J. Carter-Sigglow (1994), J. Lowe (1994), D. G. Plant (1995), L. M. Hill (1996), G. L. Cronin (1998), A. I. Karanja (1999), S. E. Meisenhelder (1999), and D. Miles (2002).

Hurston, Zora Neale (1903–1960), writer, anthropologist, folklorist.Born in Notasulga, Alabama, Zora Neale Hurston grew up in Eatonville, Florida, where her father was three‐term mayor of that first all‐black incorporated town. Her mother's death in 1904 ended her stable family life. While a student at Howard University in Washington, D.C. (1918–1924), she published her first stories. In New York City by 1925, among the Harlem Renaissance writers, she produced prize‐winning stories and studied at Barnard College with the anthropologist Franz Boas. One of the few Harlem writers of the period born in the South, she genuinely loved and appreciated black rural people and culture, especially oral culture. In the late 1920s and 1930s she returned to the region and went to Haiti and Jamaica as well to study and collect black music, folklore, poetry, and other facets of black culture. Best known for the skillful blending of anthropology and literature in her four novels, two collections of folklore, and autobiography, she was also interested in black folk performance, which led her into theater and folk concerts. Flamboyant and fiercely independent, she was not a favorite among her peers and by the late 1940s she and her works had disappeared from public view. Dying in poverty and obscurity, she was rediscovered in the 1970s. One of Hurston's most significant legacies to American literary traditions was her unwavering belief in the artistic merits of black folk culture. Hurston was posthumously hailed as a foremother by Alice Walker and many other writers. Her best novel, Their Eyes Were Watching God (1937), was a pioneering black feminist text.
See also African Americans; Feminism; Literature: Since World War I.

Bibliography

Alice Walker , In Search of Zora Neale Hurston, Ms (March 1975): 74–82.
Robert Hemenway , Zora Neale Hurston: A Literary Biography, 1977.
Mary Helen Washington , Invented Lives: Narratives of Black Women 1860–1960, 1987.
Henry Louis Gates Jr. and K.A. Appiah, eds., Zora Neale Hurston: Critical Perspectives Past and Present, 1993.
Cheryl A. Wall , Women of the Harlem Renaissance, 1995, pp. 139–99.

Nellie Y. McKay

Hurston, Zora Neale (c.1891–1960), American novelist, folklorist, journalist, and critic, was born in Eatonville, Florida, the first incorporated all-black town in America. She was a prolific writer during the 1920s and 1930s, prominent within the Harlem Renaissance. Her works include Mules and Men (1935), a study of Black American folklore in the South; Their Eyes were Watching God (1937), her best-known novel; and Dust Tracks on a Road (1942), an autobiography. Writers such as A. Walker and T. Morrison acknowledge their debt to her.