Hurston's father, John, worked as a carpenter and preacher and served several times as Eatonville's mayor. Hurston first attended a school founded by students of Booker T. Washington. After her mother, Lucy, died in 1904, John remarried, and Hurston did not get along with her stepmother. She left Florida to tour briefly with a Gilbert and Sullivan troupe where she served the lead singer as a maid. Hurston then settled in Baltimore where she worked as a waitress and attended night classes at the Morgan Academy.

After graduating from high school in 1917, she worked at various jobs. In 1920, Hurston enrolled in Howard University in Washington D.C. as an English major. She began her professional writing career in 1920 with the publication of poetry in Negro World, the newspaper of the Universal Negro Improvement Association. In 1922, her first short story appeared in Opportunity, a literary journal sponsored by the Urban League. That same year, she graduated from Howard with an associate's degree in English. The editor of Opportunity, Charles S. Johnson, encouraged Hurston's writing. When Hurston won a writing contest sponsored by the journal, Johnson encouraged her to travel to New York to join the African-American arts community. After meeting such notables as Langston Hughes and Countee Cullen at the awards dinner, Hurston decided to move to New York.

Once in New York City, Hurston became part of the New Negro Movement, which evolved into the Harlem Renaissance. She became a domestic for Fanny Hurst, one of the founders of Barnard College. When Hurst offered to sponsor Hurston, she became Barnard's only black student. She studied with anthropologist Franz Boas and received a $1400 research fellowship from the Association for the Study of Negro Life and History. While traveling in the south, she met Langston Hughes in Mobile, Alabama. He accepted her invitation to travel with her as she moved back toward New York. The two decided to collaborate on a writing project. Their play Mule Bone: A Comedy of Negro Life, intended to counter racial stereotypes, was never produced due to their disagreement over publication and production rights. It would finally be published in 1991.

Hurston's interest in anthropology led her to study various cultures, including those in Haiti and the Bahamas. In 1929, she worked to organize her 95,000 words of stories and material on religions and conjuring. During that process, she also transcribed a sermon by the Reverend C.C. Lovelace that became part of her first novel, Jonah's Gourd Vine (1934). She continued to collect local mythology and folklore from every place she visited, resulting in her second novel, Mules and Men (1935). Her works contained many autobiographical elements, particularly in the settings of all-black towns. When she returned to Jamaica in 1936 on a Guggenheim Fellowship, she likely contracted parasites and bacteria that contributed to her many intestinal and liver ailments.

Arguably Hurston's most famous novel, Their Eyes Were Watching God (1937), was not well received by other members of the black artistic and political community. Richard Wright, for one, did not approve of her "minstrel technique," which included the use of dialect by her characters. She was criticized for not employing the more popular technique of her contemporary black writers, "social document fiction," which allowed those authors to criticize segregation and the lack of ethnic identity for African Americans. Robert Hemenway later analyzed Hurston's method as a "personal transcendence of racial realities" (281). Part of the criticism grew from Hurston's acceptance of help from whites.

Hurston took part in the Negro unit of the Florida Federal Writers' Project, serving as supervisor and publishing her third novel, Moses, Man of the Mountain (1939). She received an honorary Doctor of Letters from Morgan State College and worked to record songs and stories for the Library of Congress. She also served on the faculty at North Carolina College for Negroes in Durham, but left that post following a dispute with the college's president. Additional honors included a 1943 Anisfield-Wolf Book Award for the best book on race relations, her autobiography, Dust Tracks on a Road (1942). She later contributed to the 1943 collection, "My Most Humiliating Jim Crow Experience," printed by Negro Digest. Her account focused on a medical examination that took place in a closet, rather than in the examining room of a doctor's office. Charles Scribner's Sons Publishers advanced her $1,000 for her final novel, Seraph on the Suwanee (1948).

Unable to support herself as an author, Hurston took a job as a domestic in Miami. Suffering from depression, likely contributed to by charges of child molestation, Hurston did not write for several years. The charges were dismissed in 1949, and she moved in 1951 to Eau Gallie, Florida, where her beautiful garden became legendary. Hurston again raised the ire of fellow blacks in 1954 when she wrote a letter to the Orlando Sentinel, blasting the 1954 Brown v. Board of Education ruling. She found the implication that blacks could not learn unless placed in white schools demeaning and unfounded. Until she died on January 28, 1960, Hurston worked as a filing clerk, a cook and a domestic. Unrecognized at the time of her death, she was buried in an unmarked grave.

Interest in Hurston revived with the feminist movement. In the 1970's her work became part of the new canon of writing by women. Studied and applauded by such notables as Alice Walker, Hurston's writings regained popularity. In 1973, Walker placed a marker on the field where Hurston is buried. It reads: "Zora Neale Hurston, 'A Genius of the South.' 1901-1960. Novelist, Folklorist and Anthropologist."

This essay was submitted by Virginia Brackett, Ph. D., a professor at Triton College.

For a lesson focusing on Zora Neale Hurston, click here.

Brackett, Virginia. "Zora Neale Hurston." Classic Love and Romance Literature: an Encyclopedia of Works, Authors, Themes and Characters. Santa Barabara: ABC-Clio, 1999. 173-175.

Carr, Glynis. "Storytelling as Bildung in Zora Neale Hurston's Their Eyes Were Watching God." College Language Association Journal 31.2 (Dec 1987): 189-200.

Gilbert, Sandra M., and Susan Gubar, eds. "Zora Neale Hurston." The Norton Anthology of Literature by Women: The Tradition in English. New York: Norton, 1996. 1488-1490.

Hemenway, Robert E. Zora Neale Hurston: A Literary Biography. Urbana: U of Illinois P, 1977.

Wall, Cheryl A. Zora Neale Hurston: Novels and Stories. New York:Penguin, 1995.