Author Spotlight: Zora Neale Hurston

Both an author and a trained anthropologist, Zora Neale Hurston has risen to be one of the most influential authors of American Literature. Born in 1891 in Notasulga, Alabama, Hurston grew up in the all Black town of Eatonville, Florida a place she would later use as a setting in her fiction. 

Hurston studied anthropology at both Howard University and Barnard College. After college she conducted research in the Caribbean and throughout the Southern United States focusing on a variety of subjects including black folklore, song traditions, and the roots of African culture in the South. Her book Mules and Men, is perhaps her most well known ethnographic collection. 

Though Hurston greatly contributed to the field of anthropology, she is probably best known as a prominent player in the Harlem Renaissance. Besides her most famous novel, Their Eyes Were Watching God, Hurston also wrote poetry, a collaborative play with Langston Hughes, and continued her ethnographic writing, often using her experience in the field as inspiration for her fictional work. Many of her characters speak in Black Southern vernacular which Hurston recorded during her ethnographic research. This use of vernacular by Hurston in her fiction was meant to accurately capture the speech patterns of Black people in the South. However, it was not without controversy as some of her contemporaries accused her of caricature and wanting to appeal to white audiences. 

Hurston’s conservative views, such as opposing integration, also put her at odds with many Black artists and academics of the era. Her views were in part shaped by the independent all Black town of Eatonville which she saw as an example for other communities. Hurston’s views of herself as well as race are summed up in her essay entitled “How It Feels to Be Colored Me”: 

But I am not tragically colored. There is no great sorrow dammed up in my soul, nor lurking behind my eyes. I do not mind at all. I do not belong to the sobbing school of Negrohood who hold that nature somehow has given them a lowdown dirty deal and whose feelings are all hurt about it. Even in the helter-skelter skirmish that is my life, I have seen that the world is to the strong regardless of a little pigmentation more or less. No, I do not weep at the world—I am too busy sharpening my oyster knife.

Sometimes, I feel discriminated against, but it does not make me angry. It merely astonishes me. How can any deny themselves the pleasure of my company? It's beyond me.

So while Hurston studied, wrote about, and praised Black culture, sharing it with a wider audience, she did not always see the issues and solutions to racism and discrimination as other Black intellectuals of the time. Whereas many emphasized systemic change, such as what came about from the Supreme Court Ruling in Brown v. Board of Education, Hurston took a more individualistic approach. These views complicate her legacy and should be considered when analyzing her work. 

In part because of her political views, Hurston was all but forgotten leading up to her death in 1960. However in the later part of the 20th century, Hurston’s work experienced a revival. The author Alice Walker and other scholars sought to reestablish Hurston’s place in the canon of American literature. Hurston’s strong female characters, such as Janie, the protagonist in Their Eyes Were Watching God, were especially praised. Hurston’s contributions of both anthropological and literary works continue to influence culture today. 

Hurston lead a rich life and this mini biography barely touches on her achievements. To learn more about Hurston's life and works check out one of book below:

Every Tongue Got to Confess by Zora Neale Hurston

Call Number: GR111.A47 H83 2002

A recently discovered collection of folktales celebrating African American oral tradition, community, and faith..."splendidly vivid and true."--New York Times Every Tongue Got to Confess is an extensive volume of African American folklore that Zora Neale Hurston collected on her travels through the Gulf States in the late 1920s. The bittersweet and often hilarious taleswhich range from longer narratives about God, the Devil, White Folk, and Mistaken Identity to witty one-linersreveal attitudes about faith, love, family, slavery, race, and community. Together, this collection of nearly 500 folktales weaves a vibrant tapestry that celebrates the African American life in the rural South and represent a major part of Zora Neale Hurston's literary legacy.

 

Zora Neale Hurston: Folklore, Memoirs, and Other Writings (LOA #75) by Zora Neale Hurston; Cheryl Wall (Editor)

Call Number: GR55.H86 A3 1995

In Mules and Men (1935), the first book of African-American folklore written by an African American, she returned to her native Florida and to New Orleans to record stories and sermons, blues and work songs, children's games, courtship rituals, and formulas of voodoo doctors. This classic work is presented here with the original illustrations by the great Mexican artist Miguel Covarrubias. Tell My Horse (1938), part ethnography, part travel book, vividly recounts the survival of African religion in Jamaican obeah and Haitian voodoo in the 1930s. Keenly alert to political and intellectual currents, Hurston went beyond superficial exoticism to explore the role of these religious systems in their societies. The text is illustrated by twenty-six photographs, many of them taken by Hurston. Her extensive transcriptions of Creole songs are here accompanied by new translations. A special feature of this volume is Hurston's controversial 1942 autobiography, Dust Tracks on a Road. With consultation by Henry Louis Gates, Jr., it is presented here for the first time as she intended, restoring passages omitted by the original because of political controversy, sexual candor, or fear of libel. 

Zora Neale Hurston by Zora Neale Hurston; Jean Cole (Editor); Charles Mitchell (Editor)

Call Number: available online

Though she died penniless and forgotten, Zora Neale Hurston is now recognized as a major figure in African American literature. Even avid readers of Hurston's prose, however, may be surprised to know that she was also a serious and ambitious playwright throughout her career. Although several of her plays were produced during her lifetime--and some to public acclaim--they have languished in obscurity for years. Now, eleven of these forgotten dramatic writings are being published together for the first time in this carefully edited and annotated volume. Filled with lively characters, vibrant images of rural and city life, biblical and folk tales, voodoo, and, most importantly, the blues, readers will discover a ""real" Negro theater" that embraces all the richness of black life.

Their Eyes Were Watching God by Zora Neale Hurston

Call Number: PS3515.U789 T5 2006

A PBS Great American Read Top 100 Pick "A deeply soulful novel that comprehends love and cruelty, and separates the big people from the small of heart, without ever losing sympathy for those unfortunates who don't know how to live properly." --Zadie Smith One of the most important and enduring books of the twentieth century, Their Eyes Were Watching God brings to life a Southern love story with the wit and pathos found only in the writing of Zora Neale Hurston. Out of print for almost thirty years--due largely to initial audiences' rejection of its strong black female protagonist--Hurston's classic has since its 1978 reissue become perhaps the most widely read and highly acclaimed novel in the canon of African-American literature.

 

Jonah's Gourd Vine by Zora Neale Hurston

Call Number: PS3515.U789 J66 2008

Jonah's Gourd Vine, Zora Neale Hurston's first novel, originally published in 1934, tells the story of John Buddy Pearson, "a living exultation" of a young man who loves too many women for his own good. Lucy, his long-suffering wife, is his true love, but there's also Mehaly and Big 'Oman and the scheming Hattie who conjures hoodoo spells to ensure his attentions. Even after becoming the popular pastor of Zion Hope where his sermons and prayers for cleansing rouse the congregation's fervor, he has to confess that though he is a preacher on Sundays, he is a "natchel man" the rest of the week. And so in this sympathetic portrait of a man and his community, shows that faith and tolerance and good intentions cannot resolve the tension between the spiritual and the physical. That Zora Neale Hurston makes this age-old dilemma come so alive is a tribute to her understanding of the vagaries of human nature.

Zora Neale Hurston: Novels and Stories (LOA #74) by Zora Neale Hurston; Cheryl Wall (Editor)

Call Number: PS3515.U789 A6 1995

Hurston's fiction is free-flowing and frequently experimental, exuberant in its storytelling and open to unpredictable and fascinating digressions. Jonah's Gourd Vine (1934), based on the lives of her parents and evoking in rich detail the world of her childhood, recounts the rise and fall of a powerful preacher torn between spirit and flesh in an all-black town in Florida. "There is no book more important to me than this one," novelist Alice Walker has written about Their Eyes Were Watching God (1937), Hurston's lyrical masterpiece about a woman's determined struggle for love and independence. In this, her most acclaimed work, she employs a striking range of tones and voices to give the story of Janie and Tea Cake the poetic intensity of a myth. In Moses, Man of the Mountain (1939), her high-spirited and utterly personal retelling of the Exodus story, Hurston again demonstrates her ability to use the black vernacular as the basis for a supple and compelling prose style. Seraph on the Suwanee (1948), Hurston's last major work, is set in turn-of-the-century Florida and portrays the passionate clash between a poor southern "cracker" and her willful husband. 

Barracoon by Zora Neale Hurston; Alice Walker (Foreword by); Deborah G. Plant (Introduction by)

Call Number: E444.L49 H87 2018

In 1927, Zora Neale Hurston went to Plateau, Alabama, just outside Mobile, to interview eighty-six-year-old Cudjo Lewis. Of the millions of men, women, and children transported from Africa to America as slaves, Cudjo was then the only person alive to tell the story of this integral part of the nation's history. Hurston was there to record Cudjo's firsthand account of the raid that led to his capture and bondage fifty years after the Atlantic slave trade was outlawed in the United States. In 1931, Hurston returned to Plateau, the African-centric community three miles from Mobile founded by Cudjo and other former slaves from his ship. Spending more than three months there, she talked in depth with Cudjo about the details of his life. During those weeks, the young writer and the elderly formerly enslaved man ate peaches and watermelon that grew in the backyard and talked about Cudjo's past--memories from his childhood in Africa, the horrors of being captured and held in a barracoon for selection by American slavers, the harrowing experience of the Middle Passage packed with more than 100 other souls aboard the Clotilda, and the years he spent in slavery until the end of the Civil War. Based on those interviews, featuring Cudjo's unique vernacular, and written from Hurston's perspective with the compassion and singular style that have made her one of the preeminent American authors of the twentieth-century, Barracoon masterfully illustrates the tragedy of slavery and of one life forever defined by it. Offering insight into the pernicious legacy that continues to haunt us all, black and white, this poignant and powerful work is an invaluable contribution to our shared history and culture.

Zora Neale Hurston by Deborah G. Plant

Call Number: PS3515.U789 Z824 2007

This new biography takes into account the whole woman--not just the prolific author of such great works as Their Eyes Were Watching God , Moses, Man of the Mountain, Jonah's Gourd Vine, Mules and Men, as well as essays, folklore, short stories, and poetry--but the philosopher and the spiritual soul, examining how each is reflected in her career, fiction and nonfiction publications, social and political activity, and, ultimately, her death. When we ask what animated the woman who achieved all that she did, we must necessarily probe further. Not one of the other existing biographies discusses or analyzes Hurston's spirituality in any sustained sense, even though this spirituality played a significant role in her life and works. As author Deborah G. Plant shows, Zora Neale Hurston's ability to achieve and to endure all she did came from the courage of her convictions--a belief in self that was profoundly centered and anchored in spirituality.

Zora Neale Hurston by Robert E. Hemenway; Alice Walker (Foreword by)

Call Number: PS3515.U789 Z7

Reconstructs the events, relationships, and achievements that marked the life of the black novelist, folklorist, and anthropologist, assessing her important works and commitment to the black folk tradition.

 

 

---

Attributions: 

Zora Neale Hurston (1938), Carl Van Vechten, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons

Zora Neale Hurston and unidentified man 1935 Belle Glade FL, This work has been released into the public domain by its author, Alan Lomax.