September 4, 2006
Zora Neale Hurston
Zora Neale Hurston was born in the all-black town of Eatonville, Florida. She attended Howard University and then later Barnard College where she studied with the anthropologists Franz Boas and Gladys Reichard. While living in New York in the 1920’s she became an active participant in the literary and cultural innovations of The Harlem Renaissance. During this period she grew fascinated in the scholarly study of her hometown and, in 1927, revisited Eatonville to collect folktales, spirituals, sermons, work songs, blues, and children’s games. Hurston spent six years documenting the art of “the Negro farthest down,” who, she contended, had made the greatest contribution to American culture. The product of her “literary anthropology” was Mules and Men, a novel which she published in 1935.
Hurston published her most famous novel, Their Eyes Were Watching God two years later in 1937. Her other works include Moses, Man of the Mountain(1939), Seraph on the Suwanee (1948), Tell My Horse (1938), a memoir, Dust Tracks on a Road (1942) and more than fifty published short stories, essays, and plays.
Hurston’s popularity declined in the 1940’s, particularly after the publication of Richard Wright’s Native Son when folk humor became passe. As Cheryl A. Wall writes, in the 1940’s, “Social realism and political protest were the black writers’ mandate. Critics missed the protest implicit in Hurston’s art: by rejecting the definitions of themselves the dominant society attempted to impose and by preserving, adapting, and creating their own cultural practices, Hurston asserted, African Americans waged a heroic struggle of resistance” (Wall, “Zora Neale Hurston”). Hurston died in 1960, forgotten and penniless, in a Fort Pierce, Florida. Her word was rediscovered years later by Alice Walker, author of The Color Purple. Hurston’s best-known novel, Their Eyes Were Watching God has sold over 200,000 copies since the mid-1980’s and more of her work is in print now than it ever was during her life.
Classroom Resources:
Syllabi:
Zora Neale Hurston Junior Pro-Seminar Syllabus
Professor Roxanne Mountford, University of Arizona
The Zora Neale Hurston Era
Professor Kevin Meehan, University of Central Florida
Other Web Resources:
The Zora Neale Hurston Digital Archive. This site includes a biography, criticial material, photos, course syllabi and sound clips. It’s an excellent teaching resource, particularly for university courses.
The Florida Memory Project. A compilation of all of the known Zora Neale Hurston sound recordings created while she worked for the WPA in the 1930s. Today, the original recordings are housed at the Library of Congress. Hurston worked for the WPA in 1935 and again in 1939.