Everything about Zora Neale Hurston totally explained
Zora Neale Hurston (
January 7,
1891 –
January 28,
1960) was an
American folklorist and author during the time of the
Harlem Renaissance, best known for the
1937 novel
Their Eyes Were Watching God.
Background and career
Hurston was "purposefully inconsistent in the birth dates she dispensed during her lifetime, most of which were fictitious." For a long time, scholars believed that she was born in
Eatonville, Florida in 1901.
In 1993, filmmaker Kristy Andersen established that Hurston had been born in
Notasulga, Alabama and moved to Eatonville at a young age, spending her childhood there. It was Eatonville, the first all-
Black town to be incorporated in the United States, that inspired her imagination.
Early life
Zora was the fifth of eight children of John Hurston and Lucy Ann Hurston (née Potts). Her father was a
Baptist preacher,
tenant farmer, and
carpenter, and her mother was a
schoolteacher. When she was three, Zora's family moved to Eatonville, an all-Black town with a population of 125. Her father later became
mayor of the town, which Zora would glorify in her stories as a place black Americans could live as they desired, independent of white society. Mrs. Hurston died in 1904 when Zora was 13. Zora was then "passed around the family like a bad penny" by her father for the next several years.
College and anthropology
Hurston graduated from Morgan Academy, the high school division of
Morgan College, in 1918. Later that year, she began her undergraduate studies at
Howard University. While at Howard, Hurston became one of the earliest initiates of
Zeta Phi Beta Sorority and co-founded
The Hilltop, the University's student newspaper. Hurston left Howard in 1924, unable to support herself.
Hurston was offered a scholarship to
Barnard College where she received her
B.A. in
anthropology in 1927. While she was at Barnard, she conducted
ethnographic research under her advisor, the noted anthropologist
Franz Boas of
Columbia University. She also worked with
Ruth Benedict as well as fellow anthropology student
Margaret Mead.
Career
The Harlem Renaissance
In 1925, shortly before entering Barnard, Hurston became one of the leaders of the literary renaissance happening in Harlem, producing the short-lived literary magazine
Fire!! along with
Langston Hughes and
Wallace Thurman. This literary movement became the center of the
Harlem Renaissance.
Literary career
Hurston applied her ethnographic training to document African American
folklore in her critically acclaimed book
Mules and Men (1935) along with fiction (
Their Eyes Were Watching God) and dance, assembling a folk-based performance group that recreated her Southern tableau, with one performance on
Broadway. Hurston was awarded a
Guggenheim Fellowship to travel to
Haiti and conduct research on conjure in 1937. Her work was significant because she was able to break into the secret societies and expose their use of drugs to create the
Vodun trance, also a subject of study for fellow dancer/anthropologist
Katherine Dunham who was then at the
University of Chicago.
In 1954 Hurston was unable to sell her fiction but was assigned by the
Pittsburgh Courier to cover the small-town murder trial of
Ruby McCollum, the prosperous black wife of the local
bolita racketeer, who had killed a racist white doctor. Hurston also contributed to
Woman in the Suwanee County Jail, a book by journalist and
civil rights advocate
William Bradford Huie.
Death
Hurston spent her last decade as a
freelance writer for magazines and newspapers. She worked in a library in
Cape Canaveral, Florida, and as a substitute teacher and maid in
Fort Pierce. During a period of financial and medical difficulties, Hurston was forced to enter St. Lucie County Welfare Home, where she suffered a stroke and died of hypertensive heart disease. She was buried in an unmarked grave in the Garden of Heavenly Rest cemetery in Fort Pierce. 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 decided to mark it as hers. The publication of Walker's article "In Search of Zora Neale Hurston" in the March 1975 issue of
Ms. Magazine revived interest in her work and helped spark a Hurston renaissance.
Hurston's house in Fort Pierce is a National Historic Landmark.
Fort Pierce celebrates Hurston annually through various events such as
Hattitudes, birthday parties, and a several-day festival at the end of April,
Zora Fest.
Her life and legacy are also celebrated every year in Eatonville, the town that inspired her, at the
Zora Neale Hurston Festival of the Arts and Humanities.
Politics
Hurston was a Republican who was generally sympathetic to the
Old Right and a fan of
Booker T. Washington's self-help politics. She disagreed with the big-government philosophies (including
Communism and the
New Deal) supported by many of her colleagues in the Harlem Renaissance, such as
Langston Hughes, who wrote several poems in praise of the
Soviet Union. Despite much common ground with the Old Right in domestic and foreign policy, Hurston wasn't a social conservative. She was essentially a libertarian in philosophy. Her writings show skepticism toward traditional religion and affinity for feminist individualism. In this respect, her views were similar to two libertarian novelists who were her contemporaries,
Rose Wilder Lane and
Isabel Paterson.
In 1952, Hurston supported the presidential campaign of Senator
Robert A. Taft. Like Taft, Hurston was against the New Deal welfare state. She also shared his opposition to the
Roosevelt/
Truman interventionist foreign policy. In the original draft of her autobiography,
Dust Tracks on a Road, Hurston compared the U.S. government to a “fence” in stolen goods and to a Mafia-like protection racket. Hurston thought it ironic that the same “people who claim that it's a noble thing to die for freedom and democracy ... wax frothy if anyone points out the inconsistency of their morals. ... We, too, consider machine gun bullets good laxatives for heathens who get constipated with toxic ideas about a country of their own.” Roosevelt “can call names across an ocean” for his four freedoms, but he didn't have “the courage to speak even softly at home.” When Truman dropped the atomic bombs on Japan, she called him “the Butcher of Asia.”
Public obscurity and acclaim
Hurston's work slid into obscurity for decades, for a number of reasons, both cultural and political.
Many readers objected to the representation of
African American dialect in Hurston's novels. Her stylistic choices in terms of dialogue were influenced by her academic experiences. Thinking like a
folklorist, Hurston strove to represent speech patterns of the period which she documented through ethnographic research. For example (Amy from the opening of
Jonah's Gourd Vine):
» "Dat's a big ole resurrection lie, Ned. Uh slew-foot, drag-leg lie at dat, and Ah dare yuh tuh hit me too. You know Ahm uh fightin' dawg and mah hide is worth money. Hit me if you dare! Ah'll wash yo' tub uh 'gator guts and dat quick."
Some critics during her time felt that Hurston's decision to render language in this way caricatured
African American culture. In more recent times, however, critics have praised Hurston for her artful capture of the actual spoken idiom of the day.
In particular, a number of those that were associated with her in the growth and influence of the Harlem Renaissance were critical of her later writings, on the basis that they didn't agree with or further the position of the overall movement. One particular criticism, much noted, came from
Richard Wright in his review of
Their Eyes Were Watching God.
» "... The sensory sweep of her novel carries no theme, no message, no thought. In the main, her novel isn't addressed to the Negro, but to a white audience whose chauvinistic tastes she knows how to satisfy. She exploits that phase of Negro life which is "quaint," the phase which evokes a piteous smile on the lips of the "superior" race.".
The
conservative, more accurately
libertarian, politics of Hurston's work also hindered the public's reception of her books. During the 1930s and 1940s when her work was published, the pre-eminent
African American author was Richard Wright. Unlike Hurston, Wright wrote in explicitly political terms, as someone who had become disenchanted with communism, using the struggle of African Americans for respect and economic advancement as both the setting and the motivation for his work. Other popular African American authors of the time, such as
Ralph Ellison, were also aligned with Wright's vision of the struggle of African Americans. Hurston's work, which didn't engage these political issues, didn't fit in with this struggle.
With the publication of the ambitious novel
Seraph on the Suwanee in 1948, Hurston burst through the tight bounds of contemporary black writing in yet another seemingly apolitical way. This is a tale of poor whites struggling in rural Florida's citrus industry. Black characters recede to the background. Neither the black intelligentsia nor the white mainstream of the late 1940s could accept the notion of a black writer speaking through white characters. Panned across the board,
Seraph ended up being Hurston's last major literary effort as she retreated to small-town Florida for the rest of her life. The text stands out, as she remarked herself, as a testimony to her own self-definition as a regional as much as a black writer.
In
academia, anthropologists often disdained Hurston's works as fiction, and thus unworthy of inclusion on anthropological reading lists.
Feminist critics of academia have observed that a number of novels and non-fiction works of
confessional literature written by women with anthropological training that draw upon their observations and experiences were sidelined in this fashion. Hurston's work was, in this respect, treated in the same manner as some books by
Elsie Clews Parsons,
Ella Deloria, and
Laura Bohannon, among others. At the same time, when well known male anthropologists began to experiment with literary form and style in ethnography, they were often hailed for their work. Many critics therefore perceive the lack of academic acclaim for Hurston's work to indicate a form of institutional
sexism. Hurston's books have since been discussed and celebrated not only as
African American literature, but as
feminist literature as well.
Revival
The article "In Search of Zora Neale Hurston" by Alice Walker was published in the March 1975 issue of
Ms. Magazine. This article revived interest in her work. The re-discovery of Hurston's work coincided with the popularity and critical acclaim of authors such as
Toni Morrison,
Maya Angelou, and Walker herself, whose works are centered on
African American experiences which include, but don't necessarily focus upon, racial struggle.
Biographies of Hurston include
Zora Neale Hurston: A Literary Biography by
Robert Hemenway,
Wrapped in Rainbows by
Valerie Boyd, and
Speak So You Can Speak Again by Hurston's niece,
Lucy Hurston. Her hometown of Eatonville, Florida celebrates her life in an annual festival.
Film (television)
Their Eyes Were Watching God was adapted for a 2005
film of the same title by
Oprah Winfrey's
Harpo Productions, with a teleplay by
Suzan-Lori Parks. The film starred
Halle Berry as
Janie Starks.
In 2008,
PBS produced "Zora's Roots," a documentary portraying Hurston's legacy as a writer, folklorist and anthropologist.
On
April 9,
2008 PBS broadcast a 90 minute documentary
Zora Neale Hurston: Jump at the Sun, as part of their
American Masters series.
Bibliography
- Color Struck (1925) in Opportunity Magazine
- Sweat (1926)
- How It Feels to Be Colored Me (1928)
- Hoodoo in America (1931) in The Journal of American Folklore
- The Gilded Six-Bits (1933)
- Jonah's Gourd Vine (1934)
- Mules and Men (1935)
- Tell My Horse (1937)
- Their Eyes Were Watching God (1937)
- Moses, Man of the Mountain (1939)
- Dust Tracks on a Road (1942)
- Seraph on the Suwanee (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; introduction by Mary Helen Washington) (1979)
- Sanctified Church (1981)
- Spunk: Selected Stories (1985)
- Mule Bone: A Comedy of Negro Life (play, with Langston Hughes; edited with introductions by George Houston Bass and Henry Louis Gates, Jr., and the complete story of the Mule bone controversy.) (1991)
- The Complete Stories (introduction by Henry Louis Gates, Jr. and Sieglinde Lemke) (1995)
- Barracoon (1999)
Published as
Novels & Stories: Jonah's Gourd Vine, Their Eyes Were Watching God, Moses, Man of the Mountain, Seraph on the Suwanee, Selected Stories (Cheryl A. Wall, ed.) (Library of America, 1995) ISBN 978-0-94045083-7
Folklore, Memoirs, & Other Writings: Mules and Men, Tell My Horse, Dust Tracks on a Road, Selected Articles (Cheryl A. Wall, ed.) (Library of America, 1995) ISBN 978-0-94045084-4Further Information
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