Hurston, Zora Neale

January 7, 1891
January 28, 1960

The folklorist Zora Neale Hurston was born in Notasulga, Alabama, and grew up in Eatonville, Florida, the first black incorporated town in America. For reasons that remain unknown, she claimed 1901 as the date of her birth, increasing the mystery and complexity of the woman who in the 1930s produced the single most significant novel on the nature of black female identity in the group's journey from slavery to freedom. Her father, a carpenter and Baptist preacher and a signer of Eatonville's charter, was elected mayor for three terms in succession. Her mother, formerly a country schoolteacher, taught Sunday school but spent most of her time raising her eight children. In Eatonville,

unlike in most of the South at the turn of the century, African Americans were not demoralized by the constant bombardment of poverty and racial hatred, and Hurston grew up surrounded by a vibrant and creative secular and religious black culture. There she first learned the dialect, songs, folktales, and superstitions that are at the center of her works. Her stories focus on the lives and relationships among black people within their communities.

Harlem Renaissance

The death of Hurston's mother in 1904 disrupted her economically and emotionally stable home life, and a year later, at fourteen, she left home to take a job as a maid and wardrobe assistant in a traveling Gilbert and Sullivan company. She separated from the company in Baltimore, found other work, and attended high school there. In 1918 she graduated from Morgan Academy, the high school division of Morgan State University, and entered Howard University in Washington, D.C., where she took courses intermittently until 1924. The poet Georgia Douglas Johnson and the philosopher Alain Locke were two of her teachers. Her first story, "John Redding Goes to Sea" (1921), appeared in Stylus, Howard's literary magazine.

Hurston arrived in New York in 1925, at the height of the Harlem Renaissance. She soon became an active part of the group of painters, musicians, sculptors, entertainers, and writers who came from across the country to participate in Harlem's unprecedented flowering of black arts. She also studied at Barnard College under anthropologist Franz Boas and graduated with a B.A. in 1928. Between 1929 and 1931, with support from a wealthy white patron, Mrs. Osgood Mason, Hurston returned to the South and began collecting folklore in Florida and Alabama. In 1934 she received a Rosenwald Fellowship and in 1936 and 1937 received Guggenheim Fellowships that enabled her to study folk religions in Haiti and Jamaica. She was a member of the American Folklore Society, the Anthropological Society, the Ethnological Society, the New York Academy of Sciences, and the American Association for the Advancement of Science. Based on her extensive research, Hurston published Mules and Men (1935), the first collection (seventy folktales) of black folklore published by an African American. A second volume, Tell My Horse (1938), came out of a two-month stay in Haiti and contains a poetic account of Haitian history, political analyses of contemporary events in the region, and a vivid and exciting section on Vodou as a sophisticated religion of creation and life. Her most academic study, The Florida Negro (1938), written for the Florida Federal Workers Project, was never published.

Franz Boas and Mrs. Mason stimulated Hurston's anthropological interests—interests that gave her an analytical perspective on black culture that was unique among black writers of her time—but she was also fully vested in the creative life of the cultural movement around her. Her close friends included Carl Van Vechten, Locke, Langston Hughes, and Wallace Thurman, with whom she coedited and published the only issue of the journal Fire!! Appearing in November 1926, its supporters saw it as a forum for young writers who wanted to break with traditional black ideas. Coincidentally, Fire!! was destroyed by a fire in Thurman's apartment.

Body of Work

Hurston's first novel, Jonah's Gourd Vine (1934), the story of a Baptist preacher with a personal weakness that leads to his unfortunate end, reveals the lyrical quality of her writing and her mastery of dialect. Her protagonist, modeled on her father, is a gifted poet/philosopher with an enviable imagination and speech filled with the imagery of black folk culture. He is also a vulnerable person who lacks the self-awareness to comprehend his dilemma.

For its beauty and richness of language, Their Eyes Were Watching God (1937) is Hurston's art at its best. Her most popular work, it traces the development of its heroine from innocence to the realization that she has the power to control her own life. An acknowledged classic since its recovery in the 1970s, it has been applauded by both black and white women scholars as the first black feminist novel. Moses, Man of the Mountain (1939), Hurston's third and most ambitious novel, makes of the biblical Israelite deliverance from Egypt an exploration of the black transition from slavery to freedom. Taking advantage of the pervasiveness of Moses mythology in African and diaspora folklore, Hurston removes Moses from scripture, demystifies him, and relocates him in African-American culture, where he is a conjure man possessed with magical powers and folk wisdom. The novel tells the story of a people struggling to liberate themselves from the heritage of bondage. In Seraph on the Suwanee (1948), Hurston's last and least successful work, she turns away from black folk culture to explore the lives of poor white southerners. The story revolves around a husband and wife trapped in conventional sexual roles in a marriage that dooms the wife's search for herself.

Dust Tracks on a Road (1942), Hurston's autobiography, is the most controversial of her books; even some of her staunchest admirers consider it a failure. Critics who complain about this work identify its shortcomings as its lack of self-revelation, the misleading personal information Hurston gives about herself, and the significant roles that whites play in the text. Other critics praise it as Hurston's attempt to invent a narrative self as an alternative to the black identity inherited from the slave narrative tradition. Poised between the black and white worlds, not as victim of either but as participant-observer in both, her narrative self in Dust Tracks presents positive and negative qualities from each. From this perspective, Dust Tracks is a revisionary text, a revolutionary alternative women's narrative inscribed into the discourse of black autobiography.

Reviews of Hurston's books in her time were mixed. White reviewers, often ignorant of black culture, praised the richness of her language but misunderstood the works and characterized them as simple and unpretentious. Black critics in the 1930s and 1940s, in journals like the Crisis, objected most to her focus on positive aspects of black folk life. Their most frequent criticism was the absence of racial terror, exploitation, and misery from her works. Richard Wright expressed anger at the "minstrel image" he claimed Hurston promoted in Their Eyes Were Watching God. None of her books sold well while she was alive, and throughout her lifetime she experienced extreme financial stress.

Zora Neale Hurston

"What all my work shall be, I don't know either, every hour being a stranger to get as you live it. I want a busy life, a just mind and a timely death."

dust tracks on a road: an autobiography. philadelphia: j.b. lippincott, 1942, p. 294.

Hurston and her writings disappeared from public view from the late 1940s until the early 1970s. Interest in her revived after writer Alice Walker went to Florida "in search of Zora" in 1973 and reassembled the puzzle of Hurston's later life. Walker discovered that Hurston's final return to the South occurred in the 1950s when, still trying to write, she supported herself with menial jobs. Without resources and suffering from the effects of a stroke, in 1959 she entered a welfare home in Fort Pierce, Florida, where she died in 1960 and was buried in an unmarked grave. On Walker's pilgrimage, she marked a site where Hurston might be buried with a headstone that pays tribute to "a genius of the South." Following her rediscovery, the once-neglected Hurston rose into literary prominence and enjoys wide acclaim as the essential forerunner of black women writers who came after her.

See also Caribbean/North American Writers (Contemporary); Harlem Renaissance; Literary Magazines; Literature of the United States

Bibliography

Gates, Henry Louis, Jr. and K. A. Appiah, eds. Zora Neale Hurston: Critical Perspectives Past and Present. New York: Amistad, 1993.

Hemenway, Robert E. Zora Neale Hurston: A Literary Biography. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1977.

Kaplan, Carla, ed. Zora Neale Hurston: A Life in Letters. New York: Doubleday, 2002.

Lowe, John. Jump at the Sun: Zora Neale Hurston's Cosmic Comedy. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1994.

Wall, Cheryl A. "Zora Neale Hurston: Changing Her Own Words." In American Novelists Revisited: Essays in Feminist Criticism, edited by Fritz Fleischmann. Boston: G. K. Hall, 1982.

Wall, Cheryl A., ed. Zora Neale Hurston's Their Eyes Were Watching God: A Casebook. New York: Oxford University Press, 2000.

nellie y. mckay (1996)
Updated bibliography