Zora Neale Hurston (1891 - 1960)

A scholar of considerable breadth, Zora Neale Hurston came of age as an author during the flowering of African-American culture in the early twentieth-century United States referred to as the "Harlem Renaissance." Born on January 7, 1891 in Eatonville, Florida, and educated at Howard University and Barnard College, Hurston was a keen observer of African-American life and an important proponent of the idea that there was value in a distinctive African-American cultural identity. Hurston is best known for her novel, Their Eyes Were Watching God (1937), but has also been acclaimed for her studies of Caribbean folklore, including Mules and Men (1935).

A contemporary of authors such as Langston Hughes and Richard Wright, Hurston celebrated the African- American cultural experience in her works without focusing on the racial inequality of contemporary American society. Considered more politically conservative than many of her contemporaries in the African- American literary community, Hurston was a controversial figure throughout her professional life (as evidenced perhaps most graphically by her opposition to school desegregation in the wake of the Brown v Board of Education decision in 1954).

Although Hurston did not long enjoy the success that came with the publication of Their Eyes Were Watching God (none of her seven books were in print at the time of her death), her literary legacy has been apparent in the work of acknowledged disciples such as Toni Morrison, Ntozake Shange, and Alice Walker.

Sources:

Lillie P. Howard, "Zora Neale Hurston," in the Dictionary of Literary Biography (vol. 51): Afro-American Writers from the Harlem Renaissance to 1940, eds. T. Harris and T. M. Davis (1987), 133-145.

Linda Metzger, et al., Black Writers: A Selection of Sketches from Contemporary Authors (1989), 287-288.

Tiffany R. L. Patterson, "Hurston, Zora Neale," in Facts on File Encyclopedia of Black Women in America (vol. 2): Literature, ed. Darlene Clark Hine (1997), 106-113.

Cheryl A. Wall, "Zora Neale Hurston," in African American Writers, eds., Valerie Smith, et al. (1991), 205-218.

For further resources for the study of Zora Neale Hurston, see the exhibit bibliography.

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