For our first author birthday of 2025, I selected Zora Neale Hurston. Hurston (7 January 1891 – 28 January 1960) was an American writer, journalist, documentary filmmaker, anthropologist, and folklorist. During her life, she wrote four novels, over fifty short stories, her autobiography, plays, ethnographies, and several essays. Hurston was a central figure in the Harlem Renaissance. Her works were about the Black experience, racial struggles of the early twentieth century in the American South, and the personal and professional struggles of Black women.
Considered her most significant work, Their Eyes Were Watching God, was published in 1937.
In 1894, her family moved from Notasulga, Alabama to Eatonville, Florida, one of the first all-Black towns incorporated in the United States (1887).
All four of her grandparents were born slaves. Her father was a Baptist minister, sharecropper, and later a carpenter. He would go on to become the mayor of Eatonville. Her mother taught school. Hurston was the fifth of their eight children.
After attending night courses at the Morgan Academy (now Morgan State University, a historically Black college in Maryland), she attended Howard University earning an associate’s degree. While at Howard, she founded The Hilltop, it’s first student newspaper. She paid her tuition by working as a manicurist. She went on to receive a B.A. from Barnard College of Columbia University in anthropology.
Alain Locke, the founder of the Harlem Renaissance, introduced Hurston to Charlotte Osgood Mason, a wealthy White socialite who funded the work of several promising African American writers. Mason’s financial support made it possible for Hurston to travel through the South studying African American music, literature, folklore, hoodoo, and other forms of culture; however, Mason’s generosity came with certain caveats. She wanted ownership of the information Hurston gathered.
While doing post-graduate work at Columbia University, Hurston made friends with Langston Hughes and Countee Cullen prominent figures in the Harlem Renaissance. She collaborated with Hughes on a play about the lives of Black characters and their unique cultural experiences. They couldn’t get funding or a venue, so it was never produced during their lifetimes.
Hurston differed from Langston Hughes and several members of the Black Renaissance because of her political beliefs and her support of the notion of separate but equal. Having lived in Eatonville where her community was free of racial divisions, she believed Blacks could and should control all aspects of their own lives instead of trusting White communities and governments to be inclusive.
She was a registered Republican with Libertarian views and opposed President Franklin Roosevelt and his New Deal. She feared it would make Blacks too dependent on the government and less able to forge their own paths. Ironically, Hurston was employed for several years by the WPA, (Works Progress Administration), a New Deal agency.
Hurston married three times. Each marriage was short-lived.
During her lifetime, Hurston’s works fell into obscurity. Many of her contemporaries objected to her use of dialect, claiming she perpetuated stereotypes about poorly educated Blacks and the jokes often made about their speech patterns. Hurston refused to gentrify her characters’ speech patterns or behaviors to make them more acceptable to mainstream literature.
Critics of her work also believed Hurston ignored racial themes. She insisted she was more interested in the stories of individuals, whatever their race. To illustrate her point, Hurston argued that Edison, not the entire White race, invented incandescent light. It was his accomplishment, just as George Washington Carver’s scientific research and inventions were his and not the successes of the Black community. It was a controversial stance that supported her libertarian values, but one she maintained throughout her career.
Following financial and medical problems, Hurston went to live in a St. Lucie County Welfare Home. After suffering a stroke, she died of heart disease. Because of her financial difficulties, her grave at the Garden of Heavenly Rest in Fort Pierce, Florida was reportedly unmarked. There are also records indicating monies were donated to give her a nice funeral. If so, why was her grave unmarked?
Various articles also claim it was unmarked until 1973. While another claims her grave remained unmarked until the author Alice Walker and her fellow Hurston scholar Charlotte D. Hunt located an unmarked grave in 1997 in the general area where Hurston was laid to rest. They decided to mark it as hers. The year they entered for her birth was 1901 not 1891. Hurston used 1901 as her birthdate during college to be eligible for age-restricted scholarships. These scholarships made it possible for her to continue her studies.
After Hurston's death, her private papers and works were almost destroyed by the caretaker tasked with clearing out her residence.
In 1975, fifteen years after Hurston's death, Alice Walker published an article, "In Search of Zora Neale Hurston" (later retitled "Looking for Zora"), in Ms. Magazine. This powerful piece helped revive interest in Hurston’s work. This resulted in several pieces of previously unpublished work being published posthumously.
Selected Works by Zora Neale Hurston:
Poetry (Negro World 1922):
“Journey’s End”
“Night”
“Passion”
Novels:
Jonah’s Gourd Vine (1934)
Their Eyes Were Watching God (1937)
Moses, Man of the Mountain ((1939)
Seraph on the Suwanee (1948)
Nonfiction:
Mules and Men (1935)
Tell My Horse (1938)
Autobiography:
Dust Tracks on a Dirt Road (1942)
Short Stories:
“Muttsy” (1926)
“Sweat” (1926)
“The Gilded Six-Bits” (1933)
Plays:
Color Struck (1925)
Mule Bone: A Comedy of Negro Life – written with Langston Hughes
Posthumous Works:
Barracoon: The Story of the Last “Black Cargo” (2018)
Hitting a Straight Lick with a Crooked Stick” Stories from the Harlem Renaissance (2020)
You Don’t Know Us Negroes and Other Essays (2022)