Zora Neale Hurston (1891 - 1960)
Novelist, anthropologist, folklorist
Flamboyant, bold and outrageous were Zora Neale Hurston’s writings, as was her life. As the diva of the Harlem Renaissance, Hurston was the most prolific black woman writer of her times and a brilliant chronicler of African American life.
A literary ancestor of the contemporary canon of African American women’s writings like Toni Morrison, Alice Walker and Maya Angelou, etc., Hurston helped to create the art of black women’s narrative voices.
Hurston’s genius for storytelling and drama derived from depicting the lives of her subjects in the poetic cadence of black idiom, and her art form won her critical acclaim in the 1920’s and 1930’s. Hurston’s explorations of black female characters, her analysis of women’s concerns, and their romantic quest for personal wholeness and female autonomy influenced a generation of writers.
Their Eyes Were Watching God (1937), Hurston’s fictional autobiography, is her most popular novel, and is considered the first black feminist novel of the 20th Century. A lyrical tale about one woman’s awakening and maturation, Hurston’s masterpiece is about the liberation of Janie Crawford and her search for autonomy and identity through three marriages.
In 1961 Hurston died in penniless obscurity and was buried in an unmarked grave. The article “In Search of Zora Neale Hurston” written by Alice Walker and published in Ms. Magazine in 1975 brought Hurston’s books back from obscurity. And, consequently, the novel Their Eyes Were Watching God was the best selling university press book of the 1980’s, bringing Hurston, in death, the fame and admiration that had eluded her in life. Walker in the 1980’s replaced Hurston’s unmarked grave with a tombstone that now reads “Zora Neale Hurston: a Genius of the South.
Born in Eatonville, Florida, the first all-black township incorporated in the U.S., Hurston wrote numerous short stories for literary magazines before entering Barnard College in New York City as its first black student. Hurston graduated in 1928 and then continued at Columbia University to work with the famous anthropologist Franz Boas.
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