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Zora Neal Hurston was born in Nostasulga, Alabama on January 7, 1891 and
raised from an early age in Eatonville, Florida, She received her
education at Howard University, Barnard College, and Columbia
University, where she studied under German American anthropologist
Franz Boas..
Zora was a writer
and folklorist, whose anthropological study of her racial heritage, at
a time when African American culture was not a popular field of study, influenced
the Harlem Renaissance writers of the 1930s. Zora's work also had an
impact on later African American authors such as Ralph Ellison, Alice
Walker, and Toni Morrison.
Eatonville was the first incorporated
African American town in the United States, and Hurston returned there after
college for anthropological field study that influenced her later
output in fiction as well as in folklore. Hurston also collected
folklore in Jamaica, Haiti, Bermuda, and Honduras. Mules and Men
(1935), one of her best-known folklore collections, was based on her
field research in the American South. Tell My Horse (1938)
described folk customs in Haiti and Jamaica.
As
a fiction writer, Zora was noted for her metaphorical language, her
story-telling abilities, and her interest in and celebration of
Southern African American culture in the United States. Her best-known novel is Their
Eyes Were Watching God published in 1937, in which she tracked a
Southern African American woman's search over 25 years and 3 marriages for
her true identity and a community in which she could develop that
identity. Zora's prolific literary output also included the novels Jonah's
Gourd Vine published in 1934, Seraph on the Suwanee
published in 1948, and short stories, plays, journal articles, and an
autobiography, Dust Tracks on a Road published in 1942. Zora's
work was not political, but her characters' use of dialect, her manner
of portraying African American culture, and her conservatism created controversy
within the African American community. Throughout her career she addressed issues
of race and gender, often relating them to the search for freedom.
In her later years
Zora experienced health problems, and she died impoverished and
unrecognized by the literary community in Fort Pierce, Florida on
January 28, 1960. Her writings, however, were rediscovered in the
1970s by a new generation of African American writers, notably Alice Walker, and
many of Zora's works were republished. In 1995 a two-volume set of her
fiction and nonfiction writings was published. Go Gator and Muddy
the Water: Writings by Zora Neale Hurston from the Federal Writers'
Project appeared in 1999. Hurston wrote this collection of
articles on the folklore of African American Floridians for the
Florida Federal Writers' Project between 1938 and 1939. The 1995 and
1999 collections contain previously unpublished work.
Books by Zora Neal Hurston
Jonah's
Gourd Vine (Philadelphia & London: Lippincott, 1934; London:
Duckworth, 1934);
Mules and Men (Philadelphia
& London: Lippincott, 1935; London: Kegan Paul, 1936);
Their Eyes Were Watching God
(Philadelphia & London: Lippincott, 1937; London: Dent, 1938);
Tell My Horse (Philadelphia:
Lippincott, 1938); republished as Voodoo Gods. An Inquiry into
Native Myths and Magic in Jamaica and Haiti (London: Dent, 1939);
Moses, Man of the Mountain
(Philadelphia: Lippincott, 1939); republished as The Man of the
Mountain (London: Dent, 1941);
Dust Tracks on a Road
(Philadelphia & London: Lippincott, 1942; London & New York:
Hutchinson, 1944);
Seraph on the Suwanee: A Novel
(New York: Scribners, 1948);
I Love Myself When I Am Laughing ...
and Then Again When I Am Looking Mean and Impressive: A Zora Neale
Hurston Reader, edited by Alice Walker (Old Westbury, N.Y.:
Feminist Press, 1979);
The Sanctified Church (Berkeley:
Turtle Island Foundation, 1981);
Mule Bone: A Comedy of Negro Life,
by Hurston and Langston Hughes, edited by George Houston Bass and
Henry Louis Gates Jr. (New York: HarperPerennial, 1991).
Editions and Collections
Spunk:
The Selected Stories of Zora Neale Hurston,
edited by Bob Callahan (Berkeley, Cal.: Turtle Island Foundation,
1985);
The Complete Stories, edited by
Henry Louis Gates Jr. and Sieglinde Lemke (New York: HarperCollins,
1995);
Folklore, Memoirs, and Other
Writings, edited by Cheryl A. Wall (New York: Library of America,
1995);
Novels and Stories (New York:
Library of America, 1995);
Sweat, edited by Wall (New
Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 1997).
Bibliographies
Adele S. Newson, Zora Neale Hurston:
A Reference Guide (Boston: G. K. Hall, 1987);
Rose Parkman Davis, Zora Neale
Hurston: An Annotated Bibliography and Reference Guide (Westport,
Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1997).
Biography
Robert E. Hemenway, Zora Neale
Hurston: A Literary Biography (Urbana: University of Illinois
Press, 1977).
References
Michael Awkward, ed., New Essays on
Their Eyes Were Watching God (Cambridge, U.K. & New York:
Cambridge University Press, 1990);
Harold Bloom, ed., Zora Neale
Hurston (New York: Chelsea House, 1986);
Bloom, ed., Zora Neale Hurston's
Their Eyes Were Watching God (New York: Chelsea House, 1987);
Robert Bone, Down Home: A History of
Afro-American Short Fiction From Its Beginnings to the End of the
Harlem Renaissance (New York: Putnam, 1975);
Gloria L. Cronin, ed., Critical
Essays on Zora Neale Hurston (New York: G. K. Hall, 1998);
Arthur P. Davis, From the Dark
Tower: Afro-American Writers, 1900-1960 (Washington, D.C.: Howard
University Press, 1974);
Nick Aaron Ford, The Contemporary
Negro Novel (Boston: Meador, 1936);
Henry Louis Gates Jr. and K. A. Appiah,
eds., Zora Neale Hurston: Critical Perspectives Past and Present
(New York: Amistad, 1993);
Steve Glassman and Kathryn Lee Seidel,
eds., Zora in Florida (Orlando: University of Central Florida
Press, 1991);
Trudier Harris, The Power of the
Porch: The Storyteller's Craft in Zora Neale Hurston, Gloria Naylor,
and Randall Kenan (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1996);
Robert E. Hemenway, "Zora Neale
Hurston and the Eatonville Anthropology," in The Harlem
Renaissance Remembered, edited by Arna Bontemps (New York: Dodd,
Mead, 1972);
Karla F. C. Holloway, The Character
of the Word: The Texts of Zora Neale Hurston (New York: Greenwood
Press, 1987);
Lillie P. Howard, Zora Neale Hurston
(Boston: Twayne, 1980);
Howard, ed., Alice Walker and Zora
Neale Hurston: The Common Bond (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press,
1993);
Langston Hughes, The Big Sea
(New York: Hill & Wang, 1963);
John Lowe, Jump at the Sun: Zora
Neale Hurston's Cosmic Comedy (Urbana: University of Illinois
Press, 1994);
Mary E. Lyons, Sorrow's Kitchen: The
Life and Folklore of Zora Neale Hurston (New York: Scribners,
1990);
Pearlie Mae Fisher Peters, The
Assertive Woman in Zora Neale Hurston's Fiction, Folklore, and Drama
(New York: Garland, 1997);
Deborah G. Plant, Every Tub Must Sit
on Its Own Bottom: The Philosophy and Politics of Zora Neale Hurston
(Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1995);
Eric J. Sundquist, The Hammers of
Creation: Folk Culture in Modern African-American Fiction (Athens:
University of Georgia Press, 1992);
Darwin T. Turner, In a Minor Chord:
Three Afro-American Writers and Their Search for Identity
(Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1971);
Alice Walker, "In Search of Zora
Neale Hurston," Ms., 3 (March 1975): 74 90;
Paul Witcover, Zora Neale Hurston
(New York: Chelsea House, 1991).
Sources:
Encyclopedia
Britannica
Encyclopedia
Africana
Sanford L.
Byrd
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