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About the Author |
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Zora Neale Hurston was born in 1891, in Notasulga, Alabama, although she spent most of her childhood in Eatonville, Florida, the first incorporated black township in the United States. In Eatonville, Hurston's father, a Baptist preacher, served three terms as mayor. With the death of her mother in 1904, Hurston's protected childhood ended abruptly. Her father remarried shortly after her mother's death and Hurston went to live with relatives. In 1915, she found employment as a maid with a traveling Gilbert and Sullivan musical theater group. Working as both a maid and manicurist, she completed her high school education at Morgan Academy in Baltimore. In 1923, she enrolled in Howard University, a historically black college in Washington, D. C., where she majored in English and got to know the eminent Harlem Renaissance scholar, Alain Locke, a philosophy professor. While a student at Howard, Hurston began her career as a writer having her short story published in the college literary magazine.. In 1925, she left Washington, D. C., and moved to New York City, where she enrolled in Barnard College of Columbia University. She studied anthropology with Franz Boas and completed her undergraduate degree in 1928. She continued her studies with Boas as a graduate student and began a series of field research trips studying the folklore of Alabama, Florida, Georgia, and Louisiana. The information gathered during these trips would serve as source material for several of Hurston's novels, short stories, and her innovative anthropological work, Mules and Men (1935). In the 1920s, Hurston emerged as an important writer of the Harlem Renaissance. Her works included the novels Jonah's Gourd Vine (1934), Their Eyes Were Watching God (1937), Moses, Man of the Mountain (1939) also published as The Man of the Mountain (1941), and Seraph on the Suwanee (1948); the dramatic texts Color Struck (1926), The Great Day (1932), Polk County: A Comedy of Negro Life on a Sawmill Camp (in collaboration with Dorothy Waring, 1944); and the folklore collections Mules and Men (1935), Tell My Horse (1938); and the autobiography Dust Tracks on a Road (1942). In addition to these titles, several of Hurston's works were published posthumously including I Love Myself When I Am Laughing...and Then Again When I Am Looking Mean and Impressive: A Zora Neale Hurston Reader (1979), The Sanctified Church (1981), and Spunk: The Selected Stories of Zora Neale Hurston (1985). In collaboration with Langston Hughes, a major figure of the Harlem Renaissance, Hurston wrote the play Mule Bone, A Comedy of Negro Life. However, the play, neither published nor performed during Hurston's lifetime, ended the friendship between Hurston and Hughes due to their different claims concerning authorship and copyright privileges. Despite her prolific career, Hurston's life was unstable. According to scholar Henry Louis Gates, Jr., "Hurston wrote well when she was comfortable, wrote poorly when she was not" ("Afterword. Zora Neale Hurston: A Negro Way of Saying." Their Eyes Were Watching God, 194). In the last years of her life, Hurston became increasingly conservative in her political views and lost her contact with the intellectual world. She began working as a maid and was often unemployed. In the end she was totally neglected, and when she died on January 28, 1960, she was buried in a pauper's grave with no tombstone in Fort Pierce, Florida. In 1971 Alice Walker discovered that Hurston was buried in an unmarked grave and in her personal essay, "Looking for Zora," she describes going to Florida to find the grave and adding to it a descriptive marker. With that event and the advent of the feminist movement of the 1970s came a revival of interest in Zora Neale Hurston and her writings. Note: For a comprehensive chronology of Hurston's career and personal life, consult the "Chronology" following the complete text of Their Eyes Were Watching God. | |||||||||
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Program content by Violet Bryan,Ph.D. and Robin Vander |
