Zora Neale Hurston: Folklorist, Teacher, Anthropologist
Posted on 09. Oct, 2009 by Leshell Hatley in Electrical Engineering, Faculty, I'm a Full Professor!, Scholarly Celebrations
Zora Neale Hurston (January 7, 1891 – January 28, 1960) was an American folklorist and author during the time of the Harlem Renaissance. Of Hurston’s four novels and more than 50 published short stories, plays, and essays, she is best known for her 1937 novel Their Eyes Were Watching God, a novel which was controversial because it didn’t fit easily into stereotypes of black stories. She was criticized within the black community for taking funds from whites to support her writing; she wrote about themes “too black” to appeal to many whites. Still, Hurston never received the financial rewards she deserved. (The largest royalty she ever earned from any of her books was $943.75.)
Hurston 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. Though Hurston claimed as an adult that she was born in Eatonville, Florida in 1901, she was actually born in Notasulga, Alabama, where her father grew up; her family moved to Eatonville, the first all-Black town to be incorporated in the United States, when she was three. Her father later became mayor of the town, which Hurston would glorify in her stories as a place black Americans could live as they desired, independent of white society. Hurston spent the remainder of her childhood in Eatonville, and describes the experience of growing up in Eatonville in her 1928 essay “How It Feels to Be Colored Me“.
In 1904, Hurston’s mother died and her father remarried almost immediately. Hurston’s father and new stepmother sent her away to school in Jacksonville, Florida. She later worked as a maid to the lead singer in a traveling Gilbert & Sullivan theatrical company. In 1917, Hurston began attending Morgan Academy, the high school division of Morgan College in Baltimore, Maryland. It was at this time, and apparently to qualify for a free high-school education, that the 26-year-old Hurston began claiming 1901 as her date of birth. She graduated from Morgan Academy in 1918.
In 1918, Hurston began undergraduate studies at Howard University, where she 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 and in 1925 was offered a scholarship to Barnard College where she was the college’s sole black student. Hurston received her B.A. in anthropology in 1927, when she was 36. While she was at Barnard, she conducted ethnographic research with noted anthropologist Franz Boas of Columbia University. She also worked with Ruth Benedict as well as fellow anthropology student Margaret Mead. After graduating from Barnard, Hurston spent two years as a graduate student in anthropology at Columbia University.
When Hurston arrived in New York City in 1925, the Harlem Renaissance was at its peak, and she soon became one of the writers at its center. Shortly before she entered Barnard, Hurston’s short story “Spunk” was selected for The New Negro, a landmark anthology of fiction, poetry, and essays focusing on African and African American art and literature.
In 1926, a group of young black writers including Hurston, Langston Hughes, and Wallace Thurman, calling themselves the Niggerati, produced a literary magazine called Fire!! that featured many of the young artists and writers of the Harlem Renaissance.
In 1927, she married Herbert Sheen, a jazz musician and former classmate at Howard who would later become a physician, but the marriage ended in 1931. In 1939, she married Albert Price, a 23-year-old and 25 years her junior, but this marriage, too, ended after only months. In later life, in addition to continuing her literary career, Hurston served on the faculty of North Carolina College for Negroes (now North Carolina Central University) in Durham, North Carolina. She also wrote for Warner Brothers motion pictures, and for some time worked on staff at the Library of Congress.
In 1948, Hurston was falsely accused of molesting a ten-year-old boy, and although the case was dismissed after Hurston presented evidence that she was in Honduras when the crime supposedly occurred in the U.S., her personal life was seriously disrupted by the scandal.
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 in Fort Pierce, Florida and decided to mark it as hers. Alice Walker in the 1970s helped revive interest in Zora Neale Hurston’s writings (with an article called “In Search of Zora Neale Hurston“, published in the March 1975 issue of Ms. Magazine. ), and today Hurston’s novels and poetry are studied in literature classes, women’s studies and black studies courses, and have become again popular with the general reading public. Her life was chronicled by PBS in “Jump At the Sun”.
The New York Times, Zora Neale Hurston's Legacy
Zora Neale Hurston was honored with a stamp, the annual festival named in her honor, a museum, and several other awards of recognition. For more information, audio, and video clips, visit http://www.zoranealehurston.com.
-Summarized from wikipedia, ask.com, zoranealehurston.com, and about.com
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