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Zora Neale Hurston was born in Notasulga, Alabama,
in 1891. In 1892, her family moved to Eatonville,
Florida. Her mother died in 1915 and her father
quickly remarried. Zora broke out on her own in
1917 by working as a waitress in Baltimore, Maryland
and attending Morgan Academy, which she graduated
from one year later. That same year her father died.
She enrolled at Howard University in Washington D.C.
and worked as a manicurist. One year after
graduating with her Associates degree, she published
her first book of short stories.
Zora moved to New York City and became a part of the
Harlem
Renaissance, a group of black artists. New York provided
the opportunities and atmosphere she needed in order to
thrive creatively. She entered and won writing contests;
she went to work for author
Fannie Hurst; and in 1925 her
fiction writing landed her a scholarship to Barnard
College. She then studied anthropology at Columbia
University under
Franz Boaz. With Boaz’s help, Hurston was
able to win a six-month grant to collect African American
folklore.
After college, when Hurston began working as an ethnologist,
she combined fiction and her knowledge of culture. In 1937,
Hurston published what would become her best-known and most
highly praised work,
Their Eyes Were Watching God.
The novel created controversy and made people uncomfortable—Zora
dared to write outside of the stereotypical, accepted
stories by black writers. She was criticized by both blacks
and whites. Blacks felt betrayed because she took funds
from white people in order to support her writing. And her
subject was considered too deep into black culture to
interest the white community. Her popularity declined. Her
last book was published in 1948.
She joined the faculty of North Carolina College for Negroes
in Durham for a while and she wrote for Warner Brothers
motion pictures. She also worked on staff at the Library of
Congress, but eventually, she returned to Florida,
where she wrote a series of works as part of the
Federal Writers Project. She died in poverty in
1960, her work virtually
forgotten and thus lost to most readers.
But for the efforts of Alice Walker, author of The Color
Purple, her works might still be forgotten. Walker took an
interest in reviving Hurston’s novels, and poetry. The
world was now ready for her novel,
Their Eyes Were Watching
God. Most of Hurston’s plays, written between 1925 and 1944,
went unpublished and unproduced until 1997 when they were
rediscovered in the Copyright Deposit Drama Collection at
the United States Copyright Office.
For more books by and about
Zora Neale Hurston
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