Zora Neale Hurston

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 novel Their Eyes Were Watching God.

Background and career

Childhood

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 Hurston was born and raised in Eatonville, Florida, with a birthdate in 1901. In the 1990s, it came to light that she was actually born in Notasulga, Alabama in 1891; she moved to Eatonville, the first all-black incorpoated township in the United States, at a young age, and spent her childhood there.

Hurston also lived in Fort Pierce, Florida and attended Lincoln Park Academy. Hurston would discuss her Eatonville childhood in the 1928 essay, "How It Feels To Be Colored Me". At age 13, her mother died and later that year, her father sent her to a private school in Jacksonville.

College and anthropology

Hurston began her undergraduate studies at Howard University but left after a few years, unable to support herself. She was later offered a scholarship to Barnard College where she received her Bachelor of Arts in anthropology in 1927. While 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 [1].

Career

Hurston applied her ethnographic training to document African American folklore in her critically acclaimed book Mules and Men (1935) and merged the insights she had collected through her anthropological work with lyrical prose in her novels and plays. In 1937, Hurston was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship to travel to Haiti and conduct research. She was one of the first academics to conduct an ethnographic study of the Vodun.

Death

Hurston died penniless in obscurity and was buried in an unmarked grave in Fort Pierce, Florida until African-American novelist Alice Walker and literary scholar Charlotte Hunt found and marked the grave in 1973, sparking a Hurston renaissance.

Politics

During her prime, Hurston was a supporter of the UNIA and Marcus Garvey, casting herself in fierce opposition to the communism professed by many of her colleagues in the Harlem Rennaisance such as Langston Hughes. Hurston thus became by far the leading black figure of the libertarian Old Right, and in 1952 she actively promoted the presidential candidacy of Robert Taft.

Hurston's detachment from the wider Civil Rights movement was demonstrated by her opposition to the Supreme Court] ruling in the Brown v Board of Education case of 1954. She voiced this opposition in a letter, Court Order Can't Make the Races Mix, which was published in the Orlando Sentinel in August 1955. This letter caused a furor and proved to be Hurston's last attempt at public activism.

Obscurity and acclaim

Partly as a result of Hurston's unpopular political opinions, her work slid into obscurity for decades. In addition to her controversial political views, many readers objected to the representation of African-American dialect in Hurston's novels. Hurston's stylistic choices in terms of dialogue were influenced by her anthropological training. Like a true anthropologist, Hurston strove to represent speech patterns of the period which she documented through ethnographic research. Unfortunately, this causes much of the dialogue in her novels to read like a minstrel show, as in the following excerpt from Their Eyes Were Watching God:

"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 black culture. In more recent times, however, critics have praised Hurston for her sedulous attention to the actual spoken idiom of the day.

The conservative]] 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 black 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 political struggle of African Americans. Hurston's work, which did not engage these explicit political issues, simply did not fit in smoothly with the spirit of the times.

With the publication of the ambitous novel Seraph on the Suwanee in 1948, Hurston burst through the tight bounds of contemporary black writing in yet another seemingly apolitical way. The novel is a tale of poor whites struggling in rural Florida's citrus industry, and although black characters are present, they recede into 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.

References

ISBN links support NWE through referral fees

• Abcarian, Richard and Marvin Klotz. "Zora Neale Hurston." In Literature: The Human Experience, 9th edition. New York: Bedford/St. Martin's, 2006: 1562-3.
• Baym, Nina (ed.) "Zora Neale Hurston." In The Norton Anthology of American Literature, 6th edition, Vol. D. New York, W.W. Norton and Co., 2003: 1506-1507.
• Beito, David T. “Zora Neale Hurston," American Enterprise (6 September/October 1995), 61-3.
• Hemenway, Robert E. "Zora Neale Hurston." In The Heath Anthology of American Literature, 5th edition, Vol. D. Paul Lauter and Richard Yarborough (eds.). New York: Houghton Mifflin Co., 2006: 1577-1578.
• Kraut, Anthea, Between Primitivism and Diaspora: The Dance Performances of Josephine Baker, Zora Neale Hurston, and Katherine Dunham, Theatre Journal 55 (2003): 433–50.
• Miller, William, Zora Hurston and the Chinaberry Tree, Lee and Low Books, 1994. ISBN 978-1-880000-14-4
• Visweswaran, Kamala, Fictions of Feminist Ethnography. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1994. ISBN 0-8166-2336-8
• Walker, Alice. In Search of Zora Neale Hurston, Ms. Magazine, (March 1975): 74-79, 84-89.

Bibliography

• Barracoon (1999)
• Folklore, Memoirs, and Other Writings
• Novels and Stories
• The Complete Stories (1995)
• Spunk (1985)
• Mule Bone (A play written with Langston Hughes) (1996)
• Sanctified Church (1981)
• Seraph on the Suwanee (1948)
• Dust Tracks on a Road (1942)
• Moses, Man of the Mountain (1939)
• Their Eyes Were Watching God (1937)
• Tell My Horse (1937)
• Mules and Men (1935)
• Jonah's Gourd Vine (1934)
• The Gilded Six-Bits (1933)
• How It Feels to Be Colored Me (1928)
• Sweat (1926)

See also

• African American literature
• Zora Neale Hurston Elementary School, in Miami, Florida.

External links

• Online recordings of Zora (made available for public use by the State Archives of Florida
• The Zora Neale Hurston Digital Archive
• Voices from the Gaps biography
• Literary Encyclopedia
• Folktales of Zora Neale Hurston
• Zora Neale Hurston, the WPA in Florida, and the Cross City Turpentine Camp
• Summary, analysis, and important quotes from "Sweat" and "Their Eyes Were Watching God"* Sculpture of Zora Neale Hurston
• Works by Zora Neale Hurston. Project Gutenberg
• The Politics of Zora Neale Hurston by Marcus Epstein
• Zora Neale Hurston's Views on Race by Marcus Epstein
• With this 19th stamp in the Literary Arts series, the U.S. Postal Service honors novelist, folklorist, and anthropologist Zora Neale Hurston for her artistry and her celebration of black culture.

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