Zora Neale Hurston
Zora Neale Hurston (January 7, 1891[1]: 17 [2]: 5 – January 28, 1960) was an American author, anthropologist, folklorist, and documentary filmmaker. She portrayed racial struggles in the early-20th-century American South and published research on Hoodoo and Caribbean Vodou.[3] The most popular of her four novels is Their Eyes Were Watching God, published in 1937. She also wrote more than 50 short stories, plays, and essays.
Zora Neale Hurston
January 7, 1891
January 28, 1960 (aged 69)
- Author
- anthropologist
- filmmaker
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Herbert Sheen(m. 1927; div. 1931)
-
Albert Price(m. 1939; div. 1943)
-
James Howell Pitts(m. 1944; div. 1944)
c. 1925–1950
Hurston was born in Notasulga, Alabama, and moved with her family to Eatonville, Florida in 1894. She later used Eatonville as the setting for many of her stories.
In her early career, Hurston conducted anthropological and ethnographic research as a scholar at Barnard College and Columbia University.[4] She had an interest in African-American and Caribbean folklore, and how these contributed to the community's identity.
She also wrote about contemporary issues in the black community and became a central figure of the Harlem Renaissance. Her short satires, drawing from the African-American experience and racial division, were published in anthologies such as The New Negro and Fire!![5] After moving back to Florida, Hurston wrote and published her literary anthology on African-American folklore in North Florida, Mules and Men (1935), and her first three novels: Jonah's Gourd Vine (1934); Their Eyes Were Watching God (1937); and Moses, Man of the Mountain (1939).[6] Also published during this time was Tell My Horse: Voodoo and Life in Haiti and Jamaica (1938), documenting her research on rituals in Jamaica and Haiti.
Hurston's works concerned both the African-American experience and her struggles as an African-American woman. Her novels went relatively unrecognized by the literary world for decades. In 1975, fifteen years after Hurston's death, interest in her work was revived after author Alice Walker published an article, "In Search of Zora Neale Hurston" (later retitled "Looking for Zora"), in Ms. magazine.[7][8] In 2001, Hurston's manuscript Every Tongue Got to Confess, a collection of folktales gathered in the 1920s, was published after being discovered in the Smithsonian archives. Her nonfiction book Barracoon: The Story of the Last "Black Cargo", about the life of Cudjoe Lewis (Kossola), was published in 2018.
Biography[edit]
Early life and education[edit]
Hurston was the fifth of eight children of John Hurston and Lucy Ann Hurston (née Potts). All four of her grandparents had been born into slavery. Her father was a Baptist preacher and sharecropper, who later became a carpenter, and her mother was a school teacher. She was born in Notasulga, Alabama, on January 7, 1891, where her father grew up and her paternal grandfather was the preacher of a Baptist church.[1]: 14–17, 439–440 [2]: 8
When she was three, her family moved to Eatonville, Florida. In 1887, it was one of the first all-black towns incorporated in the United States.[9] Hurston said that Eatonville was "home" to her, as she was so young when she moved there. Sometimes she claimed it as her birthplace.[1]: 25 A few years later, her father was elected as mayor of the town in 1897. In 1902 he was called to serve as minister of its largest church, Macedonia Missionary Baptist.
As an adult, Hurston often used Eatonville as a setting in her stories—it was a place where African Americans could live as they desired, independent of white society. In 1901, some northern school teachers had visited Eatonville and given Hurston several books that opened her mind to literature. She later described this personal literary awakening as a kind of "birth".[10]: 3–4 Hurston lived for the rest of her childhood in Eatonville and described the experience of growing up there in her 1928 essay, "How It Feels To Be Colored Me".
Eatonville now holds an annual "Zora! Festival" in her honor.[11]
Hurston's mother died in 1904, and her father married Mattie Moge in 1905.[12][13] This was considered scandalous, as it was rumored that he had had sexual relations with Moge before his first wife's death.[1]: 52 Hurston's father and stepmother sent her to a Baptist boarding school in Jacksonville, Florida, but she was dismissed after they stopped paying her tuition.
Work and study[edit]
In 1916, Hurston was employed as a maid by the lead singer of a touring Gilbert & Sullivan theatrical company.[12][14]
In 1917, she resumed her formal education, attending Morgan College, the high school division of Morgan State University, a historically black college in Baltimore, Maryland. At this time, apparently to qualify for a free high-school education, the 26-year-old Hurston began claiming 1901 as her year of birth.[12][15] She graduated from the high school in 1918.[16]
College and slightly after[edit]
In college, Hurston learned how to view life through an anthropological lens apart from Eatonville. One of her main goals was to show similarities between ethnicities.[17] In 1918, Hurston began her studies at Howard University, a historically black college in Washington, DC. She was one of the first members of the Zeta Phi Beta sorority, founded by and for black women, and she co-founded The Hilltop, the university's student newspaper.[18] She took courses in Spanish, English, Greek, and public speaking, and earned an associate degree in 1920.[10]: 4 In 1921, she wrote a short story, "John Redding Goes to Sea", that qualified her to become a member of Alain Locke's literary club, The Stylus.
Hurston left Howard in 1924, and in 1925 was offered a scholarship by Barnard trustee Annie Nathan Meyer[19] to Barnard College of Columbia University, a women's college, where she was the sole black student.[20]: 210 Hurston assisted Meyer in crafting the play Black Souls; which is considered one of the first "lynching dramas" written by a white woman.[21] She conducted ethnographic research with anthropologist Franz Boas of Columbia University and later studied with him as a graduate student. She also worked with Ruth Benedict and fellow anthropology student Margaret Mead.[22] Hurston received her B.A. in anthropology in 1928.[23]
Criticism[edit]
Integration[edit]
Hurston appeared to oppose integration based on pride and her sense of independence. She would not "bow low before the white man", and claimed "adequate Negro schools" already existed in 1955.[97] Hurston is described as a "trailblazer for black women's empowerment" because of her numerous individual achievements and her strong belief that black women could be "self-made". However, a common criticism of her work is that the vagueness of her racial politics in her writing, particularly about black feminism, makes her "a prime candidate for white intellectual idolatry."[98] Darwin T. Turner, an English professor and specialist in African-American literature, faulted Hurston in 1971 for opposing integration and for opposing programs to guarantee blacks the right to work.[99]
Research and representation[edit]
Some authors criticized Hurston for her sensationalist representation of voodoo.[100] In The Crisis magazine in 1943, Harold Preece criticized Hurston for her perpetuation of "Negro primitivism" in order to advance her own literary career.[101] The Journal of Negro History complained that her work on voodoo was an indictment of African-American ignorance and superstition.[102]
Jeffrey Anderson states that Hurston's research methods were questionable and that she fabricated material for her works on voodoo. He observed that she admitted to inventing dialogue for her book Mules and Men in a letter to Ruth Benedict and described fabricating the Mules and Men story of rival voodoo doctors as a child in her later autobiography. Anderson believes that many of Hurston's other claims in her voodoo writings are dubious as well.[103]
Several authors have contended that Hurston engaged in significant plagiarism, and her biographer Robert Hemenway argues that the article "Cudjo's Own Story of the Last African Slaver" (1927) was approximately 25% original, the rest being plagiarized from Emma Langdon Roche's Historic Sketches of the Old South.[104] Hemenway does not claim that this undermines the validity of her later fieldwork: he states that Hurston "never plagiarized again; she became a major folklore collector".[105]
