Zora Neale Hurston (1891-1960) was born on January 7, 1891, in Eatonville, Florida. Her family wanted for little and they lived on five acres of land in an eight-room house. Eatonville and her experiences there provided the inspiration for several of her novels, including Dust Tracks on the Road (1939). While she grew up in Florida, Hurston made her fame in New York as a writer in the 1920s and '30s during the Harlem Renaissance. She attended Morgan Academy (now Morgan State University) in Baltimore. There, she completed her high school requirements, then studied at Howard University in Washington, D.C. Her first publication came in May of 1921, which caught the attention of writer and professor, Alain Locke. Impressed with Hurston's storytelling ability, he recommended her work to Opportunity editor, Dr. Charles S. Johnson, who invited Hurston to submit material to Opportunity. She obliged, and later, at Johnson's urging, Zora packed her manuscripts and clothes and headed to New York.
In New York, she met the likes of Langston Hughes and Fannie Hurst. Before long, Hurston became an integral part of Harlem, attending rent parties and hanging out with the other newly well-known personalities such as Carl Van Vechten, Countee Cullen, and Claude McKay. She was seen as clever, witty and out-going. She was a person that people wanted to be around. She soon met Ms Charlotte Osgood Mason, an elderly white woman who employed Hurston at $200 a month to gather folk-tales and history of the African Americans of the south. Unfortunately, the relationship with Mason was severely limiting for Hurston. She could only write on subjects that were pre-approved by Mason. It wasn’t until after she severed her financial ties with Mason that her work began to take off.
One of Zora Neale Hurston's best-known works, Their Eyes Were Watching God, was published in 1937. It was deemed controversial because it didn't fit easily into stereotypes of black stories. She was criticized within the black community for taking funds from whites to support her writing. Hurston answered with an essay entitled "How It Feels to be Colored Me." (1928). She wrote: "I am not tragically colored. There is no great sorrow dammed up in my soul . . . I do not belong to that sobbing school of Negrohood who hold that nature somehow has given them a lowdown dirty deal.... No, I do not weep at the world--I am too busy sharpening my oyster knife."
With new-found friends such as Jean Toomer and Countee Cullen, Hurston became one of the "New Negroes." They, along with Langston Hughes, were the black intellectuals demanding equal billing for African-American culture in American history. Many held Hurston with special admiration. A talented young writer who would celebrate that culture through her art, she is said to have personified the movement and was dubbed the "Queen of the Renaissance." She and Hughes took off in a car, headed for the South, an adventure which would produce the folklore for which she was most well-known, including Mules And Men (1935). In 1931, she and Hughes fell out of favor with each other due to a grave argument over the authorship of a play, Mule Bone: A Comedy of Negro Life (1920), on which they collaborated. It wasn’t produced on Broadway until 1991.
Zora Neale Hurston wrote seven books and more than fifty articles and short stories. She was a playwright, traveler, anthropologist, and folklorist. In 1959 she suffered a stroke and was forced to move into a welfare home. She died penniless on January 20, 1960.
In 1973, Alice Walker made a pilgrimage to Fort Pierce, Florida and placed a tombstone on the site she guessed to be Hurston's unmarked grave. The stone was inscribed: "Zora Neale Hurston, A Genius of the South."
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