Zora Neale Hurston

Zora Neale Hurston grew up in Eatonville, Florida, in the late nineteenth century. Eatonville was the first incorporated black township in the US, and Hurston thrived there, surrounded by diverse and successful black people who would later become the source of inspiration for many of her fictional characters. She had a happy and enriching childhood until her mother died when Hurston was just 13. Her father remarried quickly, and Hurston came to consider home a poor and loveless place. As soon as she could, Hurston moved to Maryland where she worked a series of menial jobs. Hurston’s early writing coincided with New York’s Harlem Renaissance—an artistic black liberation movement spanning the 1920s—and it was in New York where she first impressed the city’s literary elite. Her writing career took off in 1925 when she won second place for both the fiction and drama categories in a writing competition launched by the magazine Opportunity: A Journal of Negro Life. As an exciting and charismatic newcomer in New York’s fashionable artistic circles, Hurston’s talents finally began to be recognized. It was because of her literary success that she received a scholarship to study anthropology at Barnard College, Columbia University. However, many Harlem Renaissance writers later criticized Hurston’s writing for its portrayal of rural, black communities. In particular, it was her celebration of the idiomatic vernacular she heard in the American South that was deemed to be degrading to black folk, and counter-productive to the black liberation movement. Hurston’s commitment to depicting black cultures without censorship often meant that her fiction exposed patriarchal power structures within the communities she fictionalized. This also garnered criticism from peers from within the Harlem Renaissance, who argued that she risked reinforcing stereotypes to her mostly white audience. It is largely due to her divergence from the political and cultural aims of the Harlem Renaissance that Hurston’s career faced obscurity in her later life. Despite the acclaim she received in the years that she was writing, Hurston never earned enough money to support herself. Having escaped rural poverty in Florida as a young woman, it is bitterly ironic that she also died there, aged 69, poor and alone.