Born in Notasulga, Alabama, Zora Neale Hurston grew up in Florida. Hurston later attended Howard University while working as a manicurist. In 1925 she went to New York City, drawn by the circle of creative black artists (now known as the Harlem Renaissance), and she began writing fiction.
While studying at Barnard, Zora Neale Hurston also worked as a secretary (an amanuensis) for Fannie Hurst, a novelist. (Hurst, a Jewish woman, later -- 1933 -- wrote Imitation of Life, about a black woman passing as white. Claudette Colbert starred in the 1934 film version of the story. "Passing" was a theme of many of the Harlem Renaissance women writers.)
After college, when Zora Neale Hurston began working as an ethnologist, she combined fiction and her knowledge of culture. Her early patron, Mrs. Rufus Osgood Mason, supported her work on the condition that Hurston not publish anything. It was only after Zora Neale Hurston cut herself off from Mrs. Mason's financial patronage that she began publishing her poetry and fiction.
Zora Neale Hurston's best-known work was published in 1937: 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.
Zora Neale Hurston's popularity waned. Her last book was published in 1948. She worked for a time on the faculty of North Carolina College for Negroes in Durham, she wrote for Warner Brothers motion pictures, and for some time worked on staff at the Library of Congress.
Eventually, Zora Neale Hurston went back to Florida and in 1960 died there in poverty, her work nearly forgotten and thus lost to most readers.
Alice Walker in the 1970s helped revive interest in Zora Neale Hurston's writings, 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.
More About Zora Neale Hurston:
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Howard, Lillie P. Alice Walker and Zora Neale Hurston: The Common Bond, Contributions in Afro-American and African Series #163 (1993)
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Hurston, Zora Neale. Pamela Bordelon, editor. Go Gator and Muddy the Water: Writings by Zora Neale Hurston from the Federal Writers Project (1999)
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Hurston, Zora Neale. Alice Walker, editor. I Love Myself When I Am Laughing...and Then Again When I Am Looking Mean and Impressive: A Zora Neale Hurston Reader (1979)
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Hurston, Zora Neale. Their Eyes Were Watching God. (2000 edition)
