Zora Neale Hurston

Zora Neale Hurston was born in Notasulga, Alabama in 1891, but she grew up in Eatonville, Florida — the first incorporated all-Black municipality in the United States, founded in 1887. Most Black Americans in the Jim Crow South grew up in the context of white dominance as the structuring fact of daily life; Hurston grew up in a town where the mayor, the police, the storekeepers, and the neighbors were all Black. She described this later as a gift: it gave her a view of Black life as life, not as response to oppression. This perspective — that Black culture had its own interior richness independent of its relationship to racism — shaped everything she wrote and put her in conflict with many of her contemporaries.

Her mother died when she was nine; her father remarried quickly and her childhood became difficult. She worked as a domestic, a manicurist, and a wardrobe girl for a traveling theater company before enrolling at Howard University in her late twenties, age misrepresented on her application. She came to New York during the Harlem Renaissance, became associated with Langston Hughes and other movement figures, and won a scholarship to Barnard College, where she studied under Franz Boas, the founding figure of American cultural anthropology. She was the only Black student at Barnard.

Boas sent her south to collect folklore — a Black woman who could enter communities where a white researcher could not. She spent years in Alabama, Florida, and Louisiana collecting folk tales, Hoodoo practices, and the vernacular speech of Black Southern culture; she also did fieldwork in Haiti and Jamaica, funded by a patron, Mrs. Osgood Mason. The collections became Mules and Men (1935) and Tell My Horse (1938). The anthropological training and the intimacy of the fieldwork — she was not an outside observer but a participant, in some cases a Hoodoo initiate — gave her fiction an authenticity of cultural texture that distinguished it from everything else being written during the Harlem Renaissance.

Their Eyes Were Watching God was written in seven weeks in Haiti in 1937. It follows Janie Crawford through three marriages across the American South, from her grandmother's hope that Janie's life will be one of security rather than struggle, through a loveless but respectable first marriage, a second to the ambitious and domineering Mayor of Eatonville, and a third to Tea Cake, a younger man with whom she finds genuine love and genuine loss on the Florida muck in the wake of the great Okeechobee hurricane of 1928. The novel is written in a close third person that slides into Janie's consciousness and in dialogue that renders Black Southern vernacular with phonetic precision and without condescension.

Richard Wright reviewed it in 1937 as without "a theme, no message, no thought" — his objection was that Hurston's focus on interior life and Black cultural richness did not engage the machinery of racial oppression directly enough for the political moment. The criticism had force in its time and damaged her reputation within the Harlem Renaissance community. It also missed the political content of what she was actually doing: insisting on the full humanity and interior complexity of Black characters is not the absence of a political act; it is a specific one.

Alice Walker's 1975 essay In Search of Zora Neale Hurston, published in Ms. magazine, described Walker's search for Hurston's unmarked grave in Fort Pierce, Florida and argued for her restoration to the American literary canon. The campaign succeeded. Their Eyes Were Watching God is now among the most widely taught novels in American universities. Hurston died in 1960 in a Florida welfare home, having had her last manuscripts rejected and her earlier work forgotten. The distance between that death and the current canonical status is one of the more dramatic posthumous reversals in American literary history.