Zora Neale Hurston

Zora Neale Hurston was born in Notasulga, Alabama, on the seventh of January 1891 (she later claimed 1901 in print, on the grounds that nobody needed to know the truth), and raised principally in Eatonville, Florida — the first incorporated all-Black town in the United States, which became the setting of much of her fiction. She took her undergraduate degree at Barnard College in 1928 — the only Black student in the college that year — and graduate study in anthropology at Columbia under Franz Boas.

She conducted ethnographic fieldwork across the rural American South and the Caribbean through the 1930s. Her field collections produced the foundational texts of Black American folklore studies: Mules and Men (1935) — the first published collection of African American folklore by a Black anthropologist — and Tell My Horse (1938), her account of Haitian and Jamaican Vodou.

Her four novels — most consequentially Their Eyes Were Watching God (1937) — established the lyrical Black female interior voice in American fiction. The book was contemporary-reviewed dismissively by Richard Wright and largely forgotten for thirty years; Alice Walker's 1975 essay "Looking for Zora" restored it to print and to syllabi, where it has been the most assigned twentieth-century Black-American novel since.

She died in Fort Pierce, Florida, on the twenty-eighth of January 1960, age sixty-nine, in poverty and obscurity. She was buried in an unmarked grave that Alice Walker located in 1973 and finally marked.

She is honored here as the anthropologist-novelist who restored the rural Black American voice to literary fiction.