Hurston, Zora Neale

Impact on the world

Published 'Their Eyes Were Watching God' in 1937, now considered a landmark of American literature exploring a Black woman's search for identity and fulfillment in the rural South, after building a body of anthropological folklore research and creative work spanning fiction, drama, and essays during the Harlem Renaissance.

Life & background

The daughter of two formerly enslaved parents, Hurston grew up in rural Alabama and Florida before attending Howard University and winning a scholarship to Barnard College in 1925, which brought her into the center of Harlem's literary culture. She helped launch the short-lived but influential literary magazine 'Fire!!' alongside other younger Renaissance writers, and wrote across genres including the autobiographical essay 'How It Feels to Be Colored Me' and the play 'Mule Bone,' co-written with Langston Hughes before a dispute over authorship ended their collaboration and friendship. Her most enduring work, the 1937 novel 'Their Eyes Were Watching God,' follows a Black woman's lifelong search for identity and fulfillment in rural Florida and is now considered a foundational text of American literature, though it received a mixed critical reception during her lifetime and Hurston died in relative poverty and obscurity; her reputation underwent a major posthumous revival starting in the 1970s, and her account of the last known survivor of the transatlantic slave trade, 'Barracoon,' was finally published in 2018, 58 years after her death.

Sources

1. Biography.com (Harlem Renaissance Artists); HISTORY.com; CliffsNotes (Zora Neale Hurston Biography)