Zora Neale Hurston

Hurston, Zora Neale

Hurston, Zora Neale, 1891?–60, African-American writer, b. Notasulga, Ala. She grew up in the pleasant all-black town of Eatonville, Fla., and 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. 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, Every Tongue Got to Confess (2001), was discovered in manuscript and published posthumously. The stories in Hitting a Straight Lick With a Crooked Stick (2020) concern the everyday lives of black people. 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) V. Boyd (2002), and V. L. Moylan (2011); 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), C. A . Wall, ed., (1997 and 2000), G. L. Cronin (1998), A. I. Karanja (1999), S. E. Meisenhelder (1999), and D. Miles (2002).

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Hurston, Zora Neale

(1903–60) writer, anthropologist, folklorist; born in Eatonville, Fla. She studied at Howard University (1923–24), Barnard College (B.A. 1928), and did graduate work at Columbia University. She spent much of her life collecting folklore of the South (1927–31; 1938–39) and of other places such as Haiti (1937–38), Bermuda (1937–38), and Honduras (1946–48); she published her findings in such works as Mules and Men (1935). She lived in New York City and held a variety of jobs, such as teacher, librarian, and assistant to Fannie Hurst. She was associated with the Harlem Renaissance of the 1920s, and would later influence such writers as Ralph Ellison and Toni Morrison. She is best known for Their Eyes Were Watching God (1937), a novel celebrating the lives of African-Americans. In 1950 she moved to Florida and became increasingly conservative and alienated from her fellow African-Americans, taking a stand even against school integration. She died in poverty and was all but forgotten, but by the 1970s her works were being rediscovered and recognized for their insights.

The Cambridge Dictionary of American Biography, by John S. Bowman. Copyright © Cambridge University Press 1995. Reproduced with permission.