Zora Neale Hurston
(1891?–1960)
Like Langston Hughes, Jean Toomer, Claude McKay, and Countee Cullen, Zora Neale Hurston was active in the Harlem Renaissance. The author of such early stories as "Spunk" and "Isis," Hurston was also a prominent Harlem personality who gained a reputation as a wit for both her humorous tales of small-town life and her high-spirited nature.
Hurston was born in the all-black town of Eatonville, Florida, probably in 1891. Throughout her life Hurston was deliberately ambiguous about her birthdate, giving various dates in her writings. Arriving in New York in 1925 to pursue a literary career, Hurston became the personal secretary to novelist Fanny Hurst and enrolled in Barnard College to study anthropology (she had previously studied at Howard University in Washington, D.C., at the time the nation’s leading African American university).
In 1927, after her graduation from Barnard, Hurston returned to Florida to study African American folk traditions. Mules and Men (1935), her most popular book during her lifetime, made use of folk materials. Her anthropological research also undoubtedly contributed to her ample supply of stories about small-time life, her commitment to oral narrative, and her ability to suffuse actual speech patterns into her prose.
Hurston’s best novel, Their Eyes Were Watching God (1937), appeared after the Great Depression had brought an end to the Harlem Renaissance. By the time her autobiography, Dust Tracks on a Road, appeared in 1942, there was no longer an audience for her work. She spent the last decade of her life in Florida, working as a maid and trying unsuccessfully to find a publisher for a long novel about Herod the Great. Only in the 1970s was her work rediscovered, and she is now widely recognized as an important interpreter of the black American experience.
