Zora Neale Hurston
1 book analyzed
Biography
Zora Neale Hurston (1891-1960) was born in Eatonville, Florida — the same town in the novel — the first incorporated all-Black municipality in the United States. She was the only Black student in her class at Barnard College, where she studied anthropology under Franz Boas, the founder of American cultural anthropology. She returned to the South on anthropological fieldwork, collecting Black folk tales, songs, and vernacular speech that became the raw material for both her scholarly work (Mules and Men, 1935) and her fiction. She wrote Their Eyes Were Watching God in seven weeks while doing fieldwork in Haiti in 1937. Male Black writers of the Harlem Renaissance — particularly Richard Wright and Ralph Ellison — dismissed the novel as 'quaint' and insufficiently political. It went out of print, and Hurston died poor in 1960, buried in an unmarked grave in Fort Pierce, Florida. Alice Walker found her grave in 1973, placed a marker reading 'A Genius of the South,' and wrote a celebrated essay that began the novel's rediscovery. It is now one of the most taught novels in American universities.