Born and raised in Eatonville, Florida, the first incorporated all-black town in the United States, Zora Neale Hurston (1891-1960) ranks among the most influential writers of the 20th century, not simply for her influence on subsequent African-American writers but also for the passionate voice she gave to black culture in this country.
After attending Howard, Columbia and Barnard universities, Hurston began her career as a folklorist and social anthropologist, traveling to Haiti to study the voodoo tradition. She quickly rejected the distanced, scientific attitude of the researcher, in order to become immersed in the culture. In two volumes, Mules and Men (1935) and Tell My Horse(1938), Hurston gathered the tales of the American South and the Caribbean.
Hurston is best known for her 1937 novel, Their Eyes Were Watching God, a novel that created controversy by refusing to admit black inferiority while simultaneously refusing to depict its characters as victims of a world that thought them inferior.
Hurston died penniless in 1960 and was buried in an unmarked grave in Fort Pierce, Florida. Her work was largely forgotten and all of it was out of print. In 1973, African-American novelist Alice Walker and literary scholar Charlotte Hunt found an unmarked grave in the general area where Hurston had been buried and marked it as hers. Walker wrote an article titled “In Search of Zora Neale Hurston” for the March 1975 issue of Ms. Magazine. This article revived interest in her work. Her works were republished and have been in print ever since.
