Zora Neale Hurston

Hurston was born in Notasulga, Alabama, in January 1891, the fifth of eight children, though she spent most of her life claiming Eatonville, Florida, the all-Black town her family moved to when she was three, and shaving a decade off her birth year besides. Her father preached and farmed. Her mother taught school and died when Hurston was 13, a loss that scattered the family and put her to work as a maid touring with a theatrical troupe. To finish high school for free as an adult, she needed to look young enough to qualify, so she gave her age as 16 and her birth year as 1901 — a fiction the record did not catch up to for decades.

She talked her way into Howard University, then became the first Black student admitted to Barnard, where she studied anthropology under Franz Boas and went home to Florida on his grant money to record folktales, songs and hoodoo practice that white anthropologists had never been trusted with. Mules and Men, published in 1935, came out of that fieldwork. Their Eyes Were Watching God, her best-known novel, she wrote in seven weeks in 1937 after a love affair ended, set in the all-Black town of her childhood and told in the Southern Black vernacular she had spent a decade transcribing. She kept working the same territory in Tell My Horse, on Haitian and Jamaican Vodou, and in Dust Tracks on a Road, her heavily fictionalized 1942 memoir.

None of it added up to a living. By the late 1940s she was working as a maid and a substitute teacher, and by 60 she needed public assistance to get by — an anthropologist with a Barnard degree and four published books unable to support herself with either. Her literary standing, high in the 1930s, had also fallen: younger Black writers of the Richard Wright generation dismissed her folklore-heavy fiction as minstrelsy dressed up in dialect, and Wright himself panned Their Eyes Were Watching God in print. She kept writing to the end without a publisher willing to take it. In January 1960 she suffered a stroke and died of hypertensive heart disease at 69, in the county welfare home in Fort Pierce, Florida.

She was buried without a headstone in the segregated Garden of Heavenly Rest in Fort Pierce, and the grave stayed unmarked for 13 years. In 1973 the novelist Alice Walker went looking for it, found roughly the right spot in an overgrown field, and paid for a marker that reads A Genius of the South. That single act, and the essay Walker wrote about it, dragged Their Eyes Were Watching God back into print and then into the center of the American canon it had been excluded from. It is now standard on high school and college syllabi, and Toni Morrison counted Hurston among the writers who made her own work possible.

Zora Neale Hurston's life against the full span of the corpus.

• Mules and Men book
  Folklore collected on a Guggenheim-funded trip through the South 1935
• Their Eyes Were Watching God book
  Written in seven weeks after a relationship ended 1937
• Tell My Horse book
  Fieldwork on Vodou in Haiti and Jamaica 1938
• Moses, Man of the Mountain book 1939
• Dust Tracks on a Road book
  A heavily fictionalized memoir 1942

• 1894 aged ~3 Family moves to Eatonville, Florida She was three, and later claimed it as her birthplace.
• 1904 aged ~13 Her mother dies and the family breaks apart Hurston was 13.
• 1918 aged ~27 Enrolls at Howard University
• 1925 aged ~34 Moves to New York during the Harlem Renaissance
• 1928 aged ~37 Graduates from Barnard, its first Black student
• 1935 aged ~44 Publishes Mules and Men
• 1937 aged ~46 Writes Their Eyes Were Watching God in seven weeks
• January 28, 1960 aged 69 Dies of a stroke and heart disease at 69 In the county welfare home, Fort Pierce, Florida.

• Langston Hughes 1901–1967
  Harlem Renaissance poet and writer whose work celebrated Black life and challenged racial injustice. Harlem Renaissance collaborator and rival
• Franz Boas 1858–1942
  Founded American academic anthropology and argued against racial determinism from Columbia University. mentor
• Toni Morrison 1931–2019
  Nobel laureate whose novels, including Beloved, explored the African American experience with profound lyricism. counted her as a literary forebear
• W.E.B. Du Bois 1868–1963
  Sociologist, historian, and civil rights activist who was the first African American to earn a Harvard doctorate. disagreed with her politics of representation