Zora Neale Hurston (1891–1960) was an American novelist, short story writer, folklorist, and anthropologist. Over the course of her career, she published 4 novels and more than 50 short stories, plays, and eassy. She’s best know for her 1937 novel Their Eyes Were Watching God.
The fifth of eight children, she was born in Alabam to two former slaves. When she was three, her family moved to Eatonville, Florida: one of the first all-black towns to be incorporated into the US. A place where African American could live as they desired, independent of white society, Eatonville became the backdrop of her stories. Her mother passed in 1904 and her dad remarried, sending Zora to a boarding school in Jacksonville. They eventually stopped paying her tutition and she was forced to drop out to support herself.
In 1918, Zora began studies at Howard University and co-founded The Hilltop, the student newspaper. She left Howard after gaining a scholarship to Bernard College, where she was the only black student and received her BA in Anthroplogy. She arrvied in New York City during the peak of the Harlem Renaissance, becoming one of the writers at its center. By the 1930s Hurston had published several short stories and Mules and Men: the groundbreaking work that documentsed the African-American folklore from timber camps in North Florida. In the 1940s she was published in several periodicals. Her work fell into a period of obscurity as people began to dislike her use of African-American dialect. The last ten years of her life, she lived in obscurity, and she suffered a stroke before dying in 1960.
