Harlem Renaissance

Born in Notasulga, Alabama, Zora Neale Hurston grew up in Florida. Hurston later attended Howard University while working as a manicurist. In 1925 she went to New York City, drawn by the circle of creative black artists (now known as the Harlem Renaissance), and she began writing fiction.

Annie Nathan Meyer, founder of Barnard College, found a scholarship for Zora Neale Hurston. Hurston began her study of anthropology at Barnard under Franz Boaz, studying also with Ruth Benedict and Gladys Reichard. With the help of Boaz and Elsie Clews Parsons, Zora Neale Hurston was able to win a six-month grant she used to collect African American folklore.

While studying at Barnard, Zora Neale Hurston also worked as a secretary (an amanuensis) for Fannie Hurst, a novelist. (Hurst, a Jewish woman, later -- 1933 -- wrote Imitation of Life, about a black woman passing as white. Claudette Colbert starred in the 1934 film version of the story. "Passing" was a theme of many of the Harlem Renaissance women writers.)

After college, when Zora Neale Hurston began working as an ethnologist, she combined fiction and her knowledge of culture. Her early patron, Mrs. Rufus Osgood Mason, supported her work on the condition that Hurston not publish anything. It was only after Zora Neale Hurston cut herself off from Mrs. Mason's financial patronage that she began publishing her poetry and fiction.

Zora Neale Hurston's best-known work was published in 1937: Their Eyes Were Watching God, a novel which was controversial because it didn't fit easily into stereotypes of black stories. She was criticized within the black community for taking funds from whites to support her writing; she wrote about themes "too black" to appeal to many whites.

Zora Neale Hurston's popularity waned. Her last book was published in 1948. She worked for a time on the faculty of North Carolina College for Negroes in Durham, she wrote for Warner Brothers motion pictures, and for some time worked on staff at the Library of Congress.

Eventually, Zora Neale Hurston went back to Florida and in 1960 died there in poverty, her work nearly forgotten and thus lost to most readers.