Zora Neale Hurston

Who Was Zora Neale Hurston?

Zora Neale Hurston was raised in Eatonville, Florida, one of the first incorporated all-Black towns in the United States, an upbringing she later credited with sparing her the early sense of racial inferiority many Black writers of her generation described confronting. Trained as an anthropologist under Franz Boas at Barnard College, Hurston conducted fieldwork collecting Black folklore across the American South and the Caribbean, work she drew on directly in both her scholarly writing and her fiction.

Their Eyes Were Watching God (1937), written in seven weeks following a failed relationship, follows Janie Crawford through three marriages toward a voice and self-possession she is denied in the first two and finds only in the third, framed by the novel's opening image of dreams as ships that sail for some men and drift away from the sight of others. The novel received mixed reviews on publication, including sharp criticism from contemporary Richard Wright, who judged it insufficiently engaged with racial protest, and fell out of print for decades before its rediscovery and canonization following Alice Walker's 1975 essay locating and marking Hurston's unmarked grave.

Hurston belongs in this archive as a novelist whose central character achieves voice and self-possession only after two marriages built on other people's definitions of who she should be. The argument essay linked below reads Janie's arc against the archive's account of identity imposed from outside versus identity found through a covering the self did not build and could not have built alone.

In Their Own Words

Selected Bibliography

• Jonah's Gourd Vine – 1934
• Their Eyes Were Watching God – 1937
• Tell My Horse – 1938
• Dust Tracks on a Road – 1942, autobiography

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