While Zora Neale Hurston might not be the most well-known figure in the American literary canon, her life was nothing short of tumultuous and, indeed, quite brilliant. Most notable among the aspects we’ll discuss today are her love/hate relationship with Langston Hughes and her work with American novelist Fannie Hurst. However, there are other, less well-known things about this often-overlooked and passed-up American author, who even still to this day hasn’t received her proper flowers.
Hurston was an American author, anthropologist, and filmmaker who often documented racial struggles in the early 1900s, thus becoming a central figure of the Harlem Renaissance. For those who aren’t in the know, the Harlem Renaissance was an intellectual and cultural revival of African American music, dance, art, fashion, literature, and scholarship centered in Harlem, New York City. Dubbed the “New Negro Movement,” after The New Negro anthology edited by Alain Locke, the Harlem Renaissance spanned the 1920s and 1930s and is a notable part of the Roaring Twenties.
Hurston was born in 1891 in Notasulga, Alabama, but moved with her family to Eatonville, Florida, in 1894. As an adult, she often used Eatonville — one of the first all-Black towns incorporated in the US — as a setting in her stories, as it was a place where African Americans could live independently of white society. By the mid-1930s, she had published several short stories, followed by her first three novels, including her best-known work, Their Eyes Were Watching God — which is regarded as her masterwork.
However, these are all well-known facts about Zora Neale Hurston. That’s why we’re about to dive deep into some lesser-known details.
She Was a Multidisciplinary Scholar
Aside from her literary achievements, Hurston was also an accomplished anthropologist. She traveled the American South and the Caribbean, immersing herself in the local customs and cultural practices for her anthropological research. Based on her work, Zora wrote Mules and Men. She also researched lumber camps and commented heavily on white men in positions of power taking Black women as sex partners.
She later traveled to Florida and Georgia to research African American song traditions and their association with slave and African music and later to Haiti and Jamaica, where she drew her research for Tell My Horse. Nora also collected folktales, songs, and anecdotes, particularly those associated with African American and Caribbean cultures, thus significantly contributing to preserving African American heritage.
Her Early Life and Education
Hurston’s mother died in 1904, and her father remarried in 1905, after which Hurston’s father and her stepmother sent her to a Baptist boarding school in Jacksonville, but she was subsequently dismissed after her parents stopped paying her tuition. She resumed her formal education in 1917, attending Morgan College, which was a high school division of Morgan State University. However, she claimed that her birth year was 1901 so that she could qualify for a free high school education, resulting in her graduation in 1918.
She began her studies that very same year at Howard University, a historically Black college. She left Howard in 1924 and was offered a scholarship by a Barnard trustee to Barnard College at Columbia University, where she was the sole Black student. Nonetheless, she received her BA in anthropology in 1928 at the age of 37.
Her Work with Langston Hughes
Langston Hughes and Zora Neale Hurston became friends while Hurston lived in Harlem in the 1920s. Both of them collaborated with Charlotte Osgood Mason, a white literary patron, and they both moved to Westfield, New Jersey, in the 1930s, where they were actual neighbors. Hughes was another prominent figure of the Harlem Renaissance, whom Hurston collaborated with on a play titled Mule Bone: A Comedy of Negro Life.
The play was a comedy about African American life, and it wasn’t staged at the time, due in large part to a falling out between Hurston and Hughes. This dissolution of friendship was fueled by a copyright issue. It was subsequently staged in 1991, more than 60 years after it was written. Unfortunately, it received negative criticism, with critics saying that the play might’ve been better had Hughes and Hurston finished their collaboration.
She Preserved Folklore
We already mentioned that Hurston was very interested in the oral histories, songs, and tales of African American and Caribbean cultures, but she wasn’t just a mere observer in the field. As mentioned above, she immersed herself in all the communities she studied, often participating in the daily lives and cultural practices of these communities. This immersion granted Hurston a deeper understanding of the oral traditions and practices she was documenting.
The previously mentioned Mules and Men is, quite possibly, Hurston’s most prominent work in folklore, with most of the tales gathered during her research in Florida. The book is sectioned into two: the first section includes folk tales and stories, while the latter deals with the practice of Hoodoo, a spiritual and healing practice in the African American culture.
Posthumous Recognition
During a period of great financial difficulties and failing health, Hurston was forced to enter St. Lucie County Welfare Home, where she had a stroke. Hurston died on January 28, 1960, due to hypertensive heart disease. Following her death, a yardman who had been instructed to clean the house was burning Hurston’s personal belongings when a law officer, Patrick DuVal, stopped the fire and saved the invaluable collection of literary documents containing some of Hurston’s work. Many of these documents subsequently found their way to numerous universities and museums.
Hurston’s work gained significant recognition when the interest in African American and women’s literature was re-sparked in the 1970s. This was mostly thanks to the work of author Alice Walker, who not only sought to bring Hurston’s contributions to literature and anthropology back into public awareness but also sought to identify Hurston’s unmarked grave. Upon finding an unmarked grave, Alice decided to mark it as Hurston’s, inscribing a marker that reads “A Genius of the South.”