Facts about Zora Hurston
4 Good Links
Zora Neale Hurston
Good summary followed by links to related personalitiesZora Neale Hurston
Feature from the American Memory site of the Library of CongressJumpin' at the Sun
Archived material from a 2005 conference on Hurston and her workJump at de Sun
An essay hitting the high points from her biographiesShare this:
Zora Neale Hurston Biography
Zora Neale Hurston was the flamboyant author of the 1937 novel Their Eyes Were Watching God, and a leading figure in African-American literature of the 20th century.
Hurston grew up in Florida, but she made her fame in New York as a writer and well-known participant in the rich cultural scene there in the 1920s and ’30s, a period sometimes called the Harlem Renaissance.
She studied anthropology at Howard University and Barnard College, and her work as a writer was intertwined with her studies of black folklore of the South.
She wrote the novels Jonah’s Gourd Vine (1934), Their Eyes Were Watching God (1937) and Moses, Man of the Mountain (1939); she published the studies on folklore Mules and Men (1935) and Tell My Horse (1938); and she published an entertaining — if not precisely accurate — autobiography, Dust Tracks on a Road (1942).
Despite her fame and reputation in the 1930s, by the time of her death in 1960 Hurston was penniless and nearly forgotten.
The emergence of African American and women’s studies in the 1970s, as well as the support of other writers (especially Alice Walker), caused renewed interest in Hurston’s work and now her books are again widely available.
Extra credit
Their Eyes Were Watching God was made into a TV movie in 2005, starring Halle Berry… Hurston claimed she was born in Eatonville, Florida, but recent biographers cite census records showing she was born in Alabama in 1891… She wrote a play with Langston Hughes called Mule Bone, but it was not published until 1991.