Her published work includes four novels: Jonah's Gourd Vine (1934), Their Eyes Were Watching God (1937), Moses, Man of the Mountain (1939), and Seraph on the Sewanee (1948). After receiving her B.A. in anthropology from Barnard College and studying with renowned anthropologist and folklorist Franz Boas in graduate studies at Columbia University, she published two collections of folktales and remedies: Mules and Men (1935) and Tell My Horse (1938). In 1942, she published what was to be the first of two autobiographical memoirs, Dust Tracks on a Road; she never delivered the second volume.
Hurston's most celebrated work, Their Eyes Were Watching God, begins with female protagonist Janie Crawford's return to Eatonville, Florida, in the 1920s. Over the course of the narrative, Janie relates details of her journey (which includes three marriages) to best friend Phoeby. The novel went against convention because of Hurston's choice to represent Janie as an erotic subject despite directives from the black literary establishment to avoid reinforcing popular racist images of black women as lacking sexual virtue. A staunch individualist, Hurston bucked convention by making sexual fulfillment part of her heroine's quest. Their Eyes is now a literary classic, named to lists of best and most influential English-language novels by sources as varied as Time magazine and the Library of Congress. In 2005, Oprah Winfrey released for television a mainstream adaptation of Their Eyes Were Watching God, starring Halle Berry. Hurston also produced scores of shorter works, including short stories, plays, and essays. In addition, several volumes of her work have been posthumously published.
During her lifetime, Hurston's work received mixed and often negative reviews. Early critics almost always missed both the nuance and the complexity of her work, but critics simply could not appreciate how she chose to represent black culture, or women, for that matter. For example, in works such as Their Eyes Were Watching God, "Sweat," "The Gilded Six Bits," and Seraph on the Sewanee, she wrote against convention on such matters as heterosexual domestic abuse, female expressions of erotic desire, gender-based oppression, and the role of capital in marital power dynamics. In Moses, Man of the Mountain, she used an age-old cross-cultural story of escape from slavery and oppression to create a postmodern story about the African American struggle for freedom and self-determination in America. She approached black folk culture from a Black Atlantic perspective long before diaspora, black world, and transnational studies became fashionable in academia. In Seraph on the Sewanee, she captured the rural southern culture and speech of Anglo-Americans much as she captured the southern rural culture and speech of African Americans in most of her work, making it relevant to American studies, linguistics, and anthropology. Much of her work is associated with the period known as the New Negro or Harlem Renaissance era. Since the 1970s, she has been strongly connected to the tradition of African American women's literature that includes Phyllis Wheatley, Maria Stewart, Harriet Wilson, Harriet Jacobs, Frances Ellen Watkins Harper, Gwendolyn Brooks, Alice Walker, Toni Morrison, and numerous others. Hurston died on January 28, 1960.
African American Folklore and Humor
Autobiographies, Memoirs, and Diaries
PAL: Perspectives in American Literature: Zora Neale Hurston
Zora Neale Hurston National Museum of Fine Arts
A Guide to the Zora Neale Hurston Papers
Zora Neale Hurston Digital Archive
The Zora Neale Hurston Plays at the Library of Congress
Encyclopedia of American Studies, ed. Simon J. Bronner (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2018), s.v. "Hurston, Zora Neale " (by Lovalerie King), http://eas-ref.press.jhu.edu/view?aid=823 (accessed August 23, 2018).
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