Zora Neale Hurston

Zora Neale Hurston was born on January 7, 1891, in Notasulga, Alabama, the daughter of a Baptist preacher and a schoolteacher. While still a small child her family moved to Eatonville, Florida, one of the first all-Black towns incorporated in the United States, where her father served as a Baptist preacher and was elected mayor. Raised inside a self-governing Black community, Hurston absorbed a world where Black life was ordinary, dignified, and whole — a well of memory she would draw from for the rest of her life. In later years she famously gave her birth year as 1901, a revision that began when she needed to qualify for a free high-school education.

She earned an associate degree from Howard University and, in 1928, a bachelor's degree in anthropology from Barnard College, where she studied under the pioneering anthropologist Franz Boas before pursuing graduate work at Columbia University. This training gave her a rare double vision: she was at once an artist and a rigorous field collector of African American and Caribbean folklore, gathering songs, sermons, tales, and folkways across the American South, Jamaica, and Haiti.

Hurston became a central figure of the Harlem Renaissance, and her fieldwork bore fruit in the landmark folklore studies "Mules and Men" (1935) and "Tell My Horse" (1938). Her novels — "Jonah's Gourd Vine" (1934), "Moses, Man of the Mountain" (1939), and above all "Their Eyes Were Watching God" (1937) — restored the rural Black-American voice, its speech and its inner life, to serious literary fiction. She also published the autobiography "Dust Tracks on a Road" (1942).

Her final years were marked by hardship and neglect; she died on January 28, 1960, in Fort Pierce, Florida, and was buried in an unmarked grave. In 1973 the writer Alice Walker sought out that grave and set a marker naming her "A Genius of the South," beginning the revival that returned Hurston to her rightful place in the American canon. She gave a whole people back their voice, and that voice endures.