Born in Notasulga, Alabama, on January 7, 1891, Zora Neale Hurston was an African American anthropologist, folklorist, civil activist, writer, and daughter of two former slaves, Lucy Ann Potts and John Hurston. Hurston considered Eatonville, Florida her home, having moved there as a toddler.
Near Orlando, Eatonville was the first all-black community in America. From a young age, Hurston grew up seeing strong African American influences, from her father, who wrote out laws for the town, and her mother, who helped write the curriculum for churches. Her mother encouraged her eight children to “jump at de sun” and, as Hurston explained, “We might not land on the sun, but at least we would get off the ground.” When she 13, however, her mother passed away, and her father quickly remarried.
By the time she was 26, Hurston had not finished high school. It struck me that Hurston pretended to be 10 years younger than she was in order to qualify for free schooling. I admire her fierce ambition, resourcefulness, and commitment to education. She also moved to New York in 1925 with $1.50 in her pocket.
She became a part of the Harlem Renaissance, befriending luminaries such as Langston Hughes. She attended Barnard as the only black scholar, where she studied under renowned anthropologist Dr. Franz Boas, and received a Guggenheim fellowship, which helped produce her most famous work, Their Eyes Were Watching God (1937).
“[Her] lifelong passion to collect, record, and broadcast the everyday idiomatic communication of her people would inform four novels, two collections of folklore, an autobiography, and dozens of stories, articles, plays, and essays.”
Most of her books were published during the Depression, and she struggled financially. By the time she passed away on January 28, 1960, she was out of print, poor, and buried in an unmarked grave in Fort Pierce, Florida. She had also been outspoken about issues such as Brown v. Board of Education, and coupled with the fact that she was African American, things seemed to work against her. Even other African American writers criticized her work. Richard Wright said she “pandered to whites” and Alain Locke thought she “[oversimplified] Southern black experience under the segregationist system known as Jim Crow.”
Hurston, in a letter, wrote: “I tried . . . not to pander to the folks who expect a clown and a villain in every Negro. Neither did I want to pander to those ‘race’ people among us who see nothing but perfection in all of us.”
Here’s where it comes together: Zora Neale Hurston was a huge influence on Alice Walker, who came across the former’s work while researching on voodoo. Walker’s essay “In Search of Zora Neale Hurston,” published in Ms. Magazine in 1975, helped revive interest in Hurston. Walker even traveled to Hurston’s cemetery to place a marker on her grave, dressing the epitaph from a Jean Toomer poem “Zora Neale Hurston: A Genius of the South.”
“I do not attempt to solve any problems [in my novels]. I know I cannot
straighten out with a few pen-strokes what God and men took centuries
to mess up. So I tried to deal with life as we actually live it—not as the
sociologists imagine it.”
—Zora Neale Hurston, from a letter to Fannie Hurst
http://www.neabigread.org/books/theireyes/readers-guide/about-the-author/
http://www.biography.com/people/zora-neale-hurston-9347659#death-and-legacy
https://www.nwhm.org/education-resources/biography/biographies/zora-neale-hurston/