Zora Neale
Hurston, the author of Their Eyes Were
Watching God, was born on January 7, 1891, in Notasolga, Alabama.
Her father, John Hurston, a Baptist preacher, moved their family to Eatonville, Florida,
where their family lived. Hurston grew up uneducated and poor, but she was
given a love for black culture and folk life.
Her father
became the mayor or Eatonville, and the Hurston family always though of
Eatonville as home. In 1904, Lucy Ann Hurston, Zora’s mother, died and her
father remarried a woman named Matte Moge almost immediately, which was
considered a social faux-pas during the time period. Hurston was soon sent off
to boarding school in Jacksonville,
Florida, but was expelled and her
father and new stepmother refused to pay for her education elsewhere.
To make it
in the world on her own, Hurston, only fourteen years old, worked as a wardrobe
girl to a lead singer in the traveling Gilbert and Sullivan theatrical company.
Soon after, she attended Morgan Academy in Baltimore,
Maryland, from which she
graduated in 1918. Upon graduation, she attended Howard University,
where she co-founded the school newspaper, The
Hilltop. She earned an associates degree in 1920 from Howard, and she
obtained a bachelor of arts in anthropology from Barnard College
in 1927 when she was thirty-six years old. After this, she studied anthropology
more in depth at Columbia
University.
In 1927,
Hurston married Herbert Sheen, who was a jazz musician. They were divorced in
1931. Then in 1939, she married Albert Price, who was twenty-five years younger
than she. However, this marriage lasted on seven months. The tumultuous nature
of her love life later comes out in her writings.
She began
to work in the Caribbean and the American
South to learn all that she could about black culture and its folklore. She
began to write fiction about the human condition, starting with Jonah’s Gourd Vine in 1934 and Mules and Men in 1935. Hurston wrote
many other novels, the most famous of which is her masterpiece, Their Eyes Were Watching God. Her works
lost their fame for a time as cultural, racial, and political objections were
raised over her stories. Her works became more famous posthumously.
She played
a major role in civil rights. She knew many of the key players in the Harlem
Renaissance, and she had her own opinions about what civil rights should be.
Hurston believed that integration wasn’t the key to fixing the racial issues of
the 1960s and before. She felt that integration would dilute black culture and
take away from black heritage.
Her work as
an anthropologist and her life fueled her writings. For those that have read Their Eyes Were Watching God, it is
apparent the parallels that can be drawn from her circumstances to the circumstances
of the characters in her story. For someone that had such a full, impacting
life, it seems strange that her exact burial place is unknown. She was buried
in an unmarked grave, but a friend, Alice Walker, later laid a gravestone in
the place where she believed Hurston was buried. Wherever she is buried, it is
obvious that Hurston had a major impact upon the world, both white and black,
and it is beneficial for all to study her life and learn from what she
experienced.
Hurston’s Works:
- Color Struck (1925) in Opportunity Magazine, play
- Sweat (1926), Short story.
- How It Feels to Be Colored Me (1928), Essay
- "Hoodoo in America" (1931) in The Journal of American Folklore
- The Gilded Six-Bits (1933)
- Jonah's Gourd Vine (1934), novel
- Mules and Men (1935), non-fiction
- Tell My Horse (1937)
- Their Eyes Were Watching God (1937), novel
- Tell My Horse (1938), non-fiction
- Moses, Man of the Mountain (1939), novel
- Dust Tracks on a Road (1942), autobiography
- Seraph on the Suwanee (1948), novel
- "What White Publishers Won't Print", Negro Digest (1950)
- I Love Myself When I Am Laughing...and Then Again When I Am Looking Mean and Impressive: A Zora Neale Hurston Reader (edited by Alice Walker; introduction by Mary Helen Washington) (1979)
- Sanctified Church (1981)
- Spunk: Selected Stories (1985)
- Mule Bone: A Comedy of Negro Life (play, with Langston Hughes; edited with introductions by George Houston Bass and Henry Louis Gates, Jr., and the complete story of the Mule bone controversy.) (1991)
- The Complete Stories (introduction by Henry Louis Gates, Jr. and Sieglinde Lemke) (1995)
- Barracoon (1999)
- Collected Plays (introduction by Jean Lee Cole and Charles Mitchell) (2008)