Zora Neale Hurston
| Zora Neale Hurston | |
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Hurston between 1935 and 1943
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| Born |
January 7, 1891 Notasulga, Alabama, U.S. |
| Died | January 28, 1960 (aged 69) Fort Pierce, Florida, U.S. |
| Occupation | Folklorist, anthropologist, ethnographer, novelist, short story writer |
| Alma mater |
Howard University Barnard College Columbia University |
| Period | c. 1925–1950s |
| Literary movement | Harlem Renaissance |
| Notable works | Their Eyes Were Watching God |
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| Signature |  |
| Website | |
| zoranealehurston |
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Zora Neale Hurston (January 7, 1891 – January 28, 1960) was an African-American novelist, short story writer, folklorist, and anthropologist. Of Hurston's four novels and more than 50 published short stories, plays, and essays, she is best known for her 1937 novel Their Eyes Were Watching God.
In addition to new editions of her work being published after a revival of interest in her in 1975, her manuscript Every Tongue Got to Confess (2001), a collection of folktales gathered in the 1920s, was published posthumously after being discovered in the Smithsonian archives.
Hurston was the fifth of eight children of John Hurston and Lucy Ann Hurston (née Potts), two former slaves. Her father was a Baptist preacher, tenant farmer, and carpenter, and her mother was a school teacher. She was born in Notasulga, Alabama, on January 7, 1891, where her father grew up and her grandfather was the preacher of a Baptist church.
When she was three, her family moved to Eatonville, Florida; in 1887 it was one of the first all-black towns to be incorporated in the United States. Hurston said she always felt that Eatonville was "home" to her as she grew up there, and sometimes she claimed it as her birthplace. Her father later was elected as mayor of the town in 1897 and in 1902 became preacher of its largest church, Macedonia Missionary Baptist.
Hurston later used Eatonville as a backdrop in her stories. It was a place where African Americans could live as they desired, independent of white society. In 1901, some northern schoolteachers visited Eatonville and gave Hurston a number of books that opened her mind to literature; she described it as a kind of "birth". Hurston spent the remainder of her childhood in Eatonville, and describes the experience of growing up there in her 1928 essay, "How It Feels to Be Colored Me".
In 1904, Hurston's mother died. Her father remarried to Matte Moge; this was considered a minor scandal, as it was rumored that he had relations with Moge before his first wife's death. Hurston's father and stepmother sent her away to a Baptist boarding school in Jacksonville, Florida. They eventually stopped paying her tuition and the school expelled her. She later worked as a maid to the lead singer in a traveling Gilbert & Sullivan theatrical company.
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