'Zora Neale Hurston' (
January 7,
1891 –
January 28,
1960) was an
American folklorist and author during the time of the
Harlem Renaissance, best known for the
1937 novel ''
Their Eyes Were Watching God''.
Background and career
Childhood
Hurston was "purposefully inconsistent in the birth dates she dispensed during her lifetime, most of which were fictitious."
[1] For a long time, scholars believed that she was born in
Eatonville, Florida in 1901. In the 1990s, a filmmaker established that Hurston had been born in
Notasulga, Alabama and moved to Eatonville at a young age, spending her childhood there. It was Eatonville that inspired her imagination.
When Hurston was 13, her mother died and her father sent her to a private school in
Jacksonville. Hurston discussed her Eatonville childhood in the 1925 short story, "Drenched in Light," which she wrote for ''Opportunity'' magazine.
College and anthropology
Hurston began her undergraduate studies at
Howard University but left after a few years, unable to support herself. While at Howard, she became a member and one of the earliest initiates of
Zeta Phi Beta Sorority. She was later offered a scholarship to
Barnard College where she received her
B.A. in
anthropology in 1927. While at Barnard, she conducted
ethnographic research under her advisor, the noted anthropologist
Franz Boas of
Columbia University. She also worked with
Ruth Benedict as well as fellow anthropology student
Margaret Mead.
[2]
Career
The Harlem Renaissance
In 1925, shortly before entering Barnard, Hurston became one of the leaders of the literary renaissance happening in Harlem, producing the literary magazine ''
Fire!!'' along with
Langston Hughes and
Wallace Thurman. This literary movement became the center of the
Harlem Renaissance.
[3]
Literary career
Hurston applied her ethnographic training to document African American
folklore in her critically acclaimed book ''Mules and Men'' (1935) along with fiction (''
Their Eyes Were Watching God'') and dance, assembling a folk-based performance group that recreated her Southern tableau, with one performance on
Broadway. Hurston was awarded a
Guggenheim Fellowship to travel to
Haiti and conduct research on conjure in 1937. Her work was significant because she was able to break into the secret societies and expose their use of drugs to create the
Vodun trance, also a subject of study for fellow dancer/anthropologist
Katherine Dunham who was then at the
University of Chicago.
[4]
In 1954 Hurston was unable to sell her fiction but was assigned by the ''
Pittsburgh Courier'' to cover the small-town murder trial of
Ruby McCollum, the prosperous black wife of the local bolita racketeer, who had killed a racist white doctor. Hurston also contributed to ''Woman in the Suwanee County Jail'', a book by journalist and
civil rights advocate
William Bradford Huie.
Death
Hurston spent her last 10 years as a
freelance writer for magazines and newspapers. She worked in a library in
Cape Canaveral, Florida, and as a substitute teacher in
Fort Pierce, where she died of a
stroke and was buried in an unmarked grave. In 1973 African-American novelist
Alice Walker and literary scholar Charlotte Hunt found an unmarked grave in the general area where Hurston had been buried and decided to mark it as hers. The publication of Walker's article "In Search of Zora Neale Hurston" in the March 1975 issue of ''
Ms. Magazine'' revived interest in her work and helped spark a Hurston renaissance.
Hurston's house in Fort Pierce is a National Historic Landmark.
Zora Neale Hurston
Fort Pierce celebrates Hurston annually through various events such as ''Hattitudes'', birthday parties, and a several-day festival at the end of April,
Zora Fest. Her life and legacy are also celebrated every year in Eatonville, the town that inspired her, at the
Zora Neale Hurston Festival of the Arts and Humanities.
Politics
During her prime, Hurston was a bootstrap Republican and fan of
Booker T. Washington's self-help and accommodationist politics She was opposed to the collectivist visions (including
communism) professed by many of her colleagues in the Harlem Renaissance, such as
Langston Hughes, who wrote several poems in praise of the
Soviet Union. Hurston thus became the leading black figure on the conservative
Old Right, and in 1952 she actively promoted the presidential candidacy of
Robert Taft, who was, like Hurston, opposed to integration.
Hurston opposed the
Supreme Court ruling in the ''
Brown v. Board of Education'' case of 1954. She felt the physical closeness of blacks to whites was not going to be the salvation her people hoped for, as she herself had had many experiences to the contrary. And she worried about the demise of black schools and black teachers as a way to pass on cultural tradition to future generations of African-Americans. She voiced this opposition in a letter, ''
Court Order Can't Make the Races Mix,'' which was published in the ''
Orlando Sentinel'' in August 1955.
Public obscurity and acclaim
Hurston's work slid into obscurity for decades, for a number of reasons, both cultural and political.
Many readers objected to the representation of
African American dialect in Hurston's novels. Her stylistic choices in terms of dialogue were influenced by her academic experiences. Thinking like a
folklorist, Hurston strove to represent speech patterns of the period which she documented through ethnographic research. For example (Amy from the opening of ''Jonah's Gourd Vine''):
:''"Dat's a big ole resurrection lie, Ned. Uh slew-foot, drag-leg lie at dat, and Ah dare yuh tuh hit me too. You know Ahm uh fightin' dawg and mah hide is worth money. Hit me if you dare! Ah'll wash yo' tub uh 'gator guts and dat quick."''
Some critics during her time felt that Hurston's decision to render language in this way caricatured black culture. In more recent times, however, critics have praised Hurston for her artful capture of the actual spoken idiom of the day.
In particular, a number of those that were associated with her in the growth and influence of the Harlem Renaissance were critical of her later writings, on the basis that they did not agree with or further the position of the overall movement. One particular criticism, much noted, came from
Richard Wright in his review of ''Their Eyes Were Watching God''.
:". . . The sensory sweep of her novel carries no theme, no message, no thought. In the main, her novel is not addressed to the Negro, but to a white audience whose chauvinistic tastes she knows how to satisfy. She exploits that phase of Negro life which is "quaint," the phase which evokes a piteous smile on the lips of the "superior" race."
[5].
The
conservative politics of Hurston's work also hindered the public's reception of her books. During the 1930s and 1940s when her work was published, the pre-eminent
African American author was Richard Wright. Unlike Hurston, Wright wrote in explicitly political terms, as someone who had become disenchanted with communism, using the struggle of black Americans for respect and economic advancement as both the setting and the motivation for his work. Other popular African American authors of the time, such as
Ralph Ellison, were also aligned with Wright's vision of the struggle of African Americans. Hurston's work, which did not engage these political issues, simply did not fit in with this struggle.
With the publication of the ambitious novel ''
Seraph on the Suwanee'' in 1948, Hurston burst through the tight bounds of contemporary black writing in yet another seemingly apolitical way. This is a tale of poor whites struggling in rural Florida's citrus industry. Black characters recede to the background. Neither the black intelligentsia nor the white mainstream of the late 1940s could accept the notion of a black writer speaking through white characters. Panned across the board, ''Seraph'' ended up being Hurston's last major literary effort as she retreated to small-town Florida for the rest of her life. The text stands out, as she remarked herself, as a testimony to her own self-definition as a regional as much as a black writer.
In
academia, anthropologists often disdained Hurston's works as fiction, and thus unworthy of inclusion on anthropological reading lists.
Feminist critics of academia have observed that a number of novels and non-fiction works of
confessional literature written by women with anthropological training that draw upon their observations and experiences were sidelined in this fashion. Hurston's work was, in this respect, treated in the same manner as some books by
Elsie Clews Parsons,
Ella Deloria, and
Laura Bohannon, among others. At the same time, when well known male anthropologists began to experiment with literary form and style in ethnography, they were often hailed for their work. Many critics therefore perceive the lack of academic acclaim for Hurston's work to indicate a form of institutional
sexism. Hurston's books have since been discussed and celebrated not only as
African American literature, but as
feminist literature as well.
Revival
The article "In Search of Zora Neale Hurston" by Alice Walker was published in the March 1975 issue of ''
Ms. Magazine''. This article revived interest in her work. The re-discovery of Hurston's work coincided with the popularity and critical acclaim of authors such as
Toni Morrison,
Maya Angelou, and Walker herself, whose works are centered on
African American experiences which include, but do not necessarily focus upon, racial struggle.
Biographies of Hurston include ''Zora Neale Hurston: A Literary Biography'' by
Robert Hemenway, ''Wrapped in Rainbows'' by
Valerie Boyd, and ''Speak So You Can Speak Again'' by Hurston's niece,
Lucy Hurston. Her hometown of Eatonville, Florida celebrates her life in an annual festival.
Film (television)
''Their Eyes Were Watching God'' was adapted for a 2005
film of the same title by
Oprah Winfrey's
Harpo Productions, with a teleplay by
Suzan-Lori Parks. The film starred
Halle Berry as
Janie Starks.
Bibliography
★ ''
Color Struck'' (1925) in ''Opportunity Magazine''
★ ''Sweat'' (1926)
★ ''How It Feels to Be Colored Me'' (1928)
★ ''The Gilded Six-Bits'' (1933)
★ ''Jonah's Gourd Vine'' (1934)
★ ''Mules and Men'' (1935)
★ ''Tell My Horse'' (1937)
★ ''
Their Eyes Were Watching God'' (1937)
★ ''Moses, Man of the Mountain'' (1939)
★ ''Dust Tracks on a Road'' (1942)
★ ''Seraph on the Suwanee'' (1948)
★ ''I Love Myself When I Am Laughing...and Then Again When I Am Looking Mean and Impressive: A Zora Neale Hurston Reader'' (edited by Alice Walker; introduction by Mary Helen Washington) (1979)
★ ''Sanctified Church'' (1981)
★ ''Spunk: Selected Stories'' (1985)
★ ''Mule Bone: A Comedy of Negro Life'' (play, with
Langston Hughes; edited with introductions by George Houston Bass and
Henry Louis Gates, Jr., and the complete story of the Mule bone controversy.) (1991)
★ ''The Complete Stories'' (introduction by Henry Louis Gates, Jr. and Sieglinde Lemke) (1995)
★ ''Barracoon'' (1999)
Published as
★ ''Novels & Stories: Jonah's Gourd Vine, Their Eyes Were Watching God, Moses, Man of the Mountain, Seraph on the Suwanee, Selected Stories'' (Cheryl A. Wall, ed.) (
Library of America, 1995) ISBN 978-0-94045083-7
★ '' Folklore, Memoirs, & Other Writings: Mules and Men, Tell My Horse, Dust Tracks on a Road, Selected Articles'' (Cheryl A. Wall, ed.) (Library of America, 1995) ISBN 978-0-94045084-4
See also
★
African American literature
★
Paramour Rights
★
Ruby McCollum
Notes
1. Hemenway, Robert E. ''Zora Neale Hurston: A Literary Biography''. University of Illinois Press. ISBN 0-252-00807-3. Page 13.
2. A Century of Barnard Anthropology, The Early Period
3. The Harlem Renaissance at MSN Encarta
4. Katherine Dunham Returns to Haiti, Black World Today, by Herb Boyd 02 April 2004
5. "Between Laughter and Tears," review by Richard Wright of ''Their Eyes Were Watching God'' for New Masses, 5 October 1937
References
★ Abcarian, Richard and Marvin Klotz. "Zora Neale Hurston." In ''Literature: The Human Experience'', 9th edition. New York: Bedford/St. Martin's, 2006: 1562-3.
★ Baym, Nina (ed.) "Zora Neale Hurston." In ''The Norton Anthology of American Literature'', 6th edition, Vol. D. New York,
W.W. Norton and Co., 2003: 1506-1507.
★ Beito, David T. “Zora Neale Hurston," American Enterprise (6 September/October 1995), 61-3.
★ Ellis, C. Arthur, Ph.D. ''The Trial of Ruby McCollum'', Author House, 2003. Contains transcript of trial covered by Hurston.
★ Hemenway, Robert E. "Zora Neale Hurston." In ''The Heath Anthology of American Literature'', 5th edition, Vol. D. Paul Lauter and Richard Yarborough (eds.). New York: Houghton Mifflin Co., 2006: 1577-1578.
★ Kraut, Anthea, "Between Primitivism and Diaspora: The Dance Performances of
Josephine Baker, Zora Neale Hurston, and
Katherine Dunham," ''Theatre Journal'' 55 (2003): 433–50.
★ Menefee, Samuel Pyeatt, "Zora Neale Hurston (1891-1960)." In '' Women and Tradition: A Neglected Group of Folklorists '' Hilda Ellis Davidson and Carmen Blacker (eds.). Durham, NC, Carolina Academic Press, 2000: 157-72.
★ Visweswaran, Kamala, ''Fictions of Feminist Ethnography.'' Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1994. ISBN 0-8166-2336-8
★ Walker, Alice. "In Search of Zora Neale Hurston", ''
Ms. Magazine'', (March 1975): 74-79, 84-89.
External links
★ State Library and Archives of Florida
★
★
Sound recordings of Hurston in the 1930s
★
★
Zora Neale Hurston, the WPA in Florida, and the Cross City Turpentine Camp
★
The Zora Neale Hurston Digital Archive -
University of Central Florida
★
Voices from the Gaps biography -
University of Minnesota
★
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