Zora Neale Hurston
(1891-1960)

Died aged c. 69

Zora Neale Hurston was one of the most influential American writers of the 20th century. Born in 1891 in Notasulga, Alabama, Hurston was a folklorist and anthropologist. Her family moved to Eatonville in 1893. She was a recipient of Rosenwald and Guggenheim fellowships and was one of the first blacks to graduate from Barnard College in New York City. Her autobiographical work, Dust Tracks on the Road, won the Anisfield-Wolf award from the Saturday Review in 1943. She spent the last years of her life in obscurity in Fort Pierce. Here, she worked on her last book, The Life of Herod the Great, and also taught at Lincoln Park Academy, now the Lincoln Park Academy Magnet School. She died in 1960 in Fort Pierce. Today her novels, stories and autobiography are on reading lists of schools across the nation.

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Zora Neale Hurston (January 7, 1891 – January 28, 1960) was an American author, anthropologist, and filmmaker. She portrayed racial struggles in the early-1900s American South and published research on hoodoo. The most popular of her four novels is Their Eyes Were Watching God, published in 1937. She also wrote more than 50 short stories, plays, and essays. Hurston was born in Notasulga, Alabama, and moved with her family to Eatonville, Florida, in 1894. She later used Eatonville as the setting for many of her stories.In her early career, Hurston conducted anthropological and ethnographic research while a student at Barnard College and Columbia University. She had an interest in African-American and Caribbean folklore, and how these contributed to the community's identity. She also wrote fiction about contemporary issues in the Black community and became a central figure of the Harlem Renaissance. Her short satires, drawing from the African-American experience and racial division, were published in anthologies such as The New Negro and Fire!! After moving back to Florida, Hurston wrote and published her literary anthology on African-American folklore in North Florida, Mules and Men (1935), and her first three novels: Jonah's Gourd Vine (1934); Their Eyes Were Watching God (1937); and Moses, Man of the Mountain (1939). Also published during this time was Tell My Horse: Voodoo and Life in Haiti and Jamaica (1938), documenting her research on rituals in Jamaica and Haiti. Hurston's works concerned both the African-American experience and her struggles as an African-American woman. Her novels went relatively unrecognized by the literary world for decades. Interest was revived in 1975 after author Alice Walker published an article, "In Search of Zora Neale Hurston" (later retitled “Looking for Zora”), in the March issue of Ms. magazine that year. Hurston's manuscript Every Tongue Got to Confess, a collection of folktales gathered in the 1920s, was published posthumously in 2001 after being discovered in the Smithsonian archives. Her nonfiction book Barracoon: The Story of the Last "Black Cargo", about the life of Cudjoe Lewis (Kossola), was published posthumously in 2018.

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