According to Zora Neale Hurston herself, it was her mother who inspired her to become a success by frequently telling her to "jump at de sun." Hurston's mother meant by saying that her daughter should try for the impossible because by trying, "we might not land on the sun,but at least we...get off the ground." Hurston was a spirited child, outspoken and frequently into mischief. Again, according to her own account, she was also a tale-teller from a very young age.
Until recently most scholars believed that Zora Neale Hurston was born in 1901 in the all-black town of Eatonville, Florida. But scholars have always claimed to be unsure of this date, since Hurston sometimes claimed to have been born as early as 1898, and sometimes as late as 1903. In fact she was born in 1891 in Notasulga, Alabama, the fifth child of Lucy Ann Potts and John Hurston. The family moved to Eatonville when Zora was three years of age.
As a child, Hurston was an avid reader, and enjoyed living in the realm of her imagination. In her autobiography she talks of playing with a corn husk, and a bar of soap, and an old doorknob. To her, however, these became "Miss Corn Shuck," "Mr. Sweet Smell," and "Reverend Door Knob."
Hurston's mother died when she was nine, and her death was a traumatic event in young Hurston's life. The years following were also very difficult, in part because Hurston's father quickly remarried and Zora no longer had a place in the family. She was sent to live with relatives, and then sent away to school. Eventually she became a wardrobe girl with a Gilbert and Sullivan theatrical troupe and toured the South, learning enough about the world to realize she wanted more education. When the troupe visited Baltimore, she decided to stay there and attend Morgan Academy, the high school division of what is now Morgan State University.
Hurston graduated from Morgan Academy in June, 1918, and at the suggestion of friends of hers moved to Washington D.C. and soon entered Howard University, where she studied part-time while she also worked as a manicurist, a waitress, and a maid. Hurston's college record was inconsistent: she received A's in classes she liked but F's in classes that did not interest her. She was granted an associate degree in 1920. In May 1921, Hurston published her first story, "John Redding Goes to Sea," in the college's literary magazine.
Hurston's first short story is not considered to be very accomplished, but it does show us that she was attempting to write fiction that focuses on her experiences living in Eatonville, Florida. Other early fiction also focuses on Eatonville characters, and the story "Spunk" and the play Color Struck, which she submitted to a 1925 Opportunity magazine contest, both won prizes.
By January, 1925, Hurston had moved from Washington D.C. to New York City, and her prize-winning literary work earned her an invitation to the Opportunity contest award dinner. At this dinner, Hurston was honored as one of the prominent talents in the new movement in the black arts, now named the Harlem Renaissance. She also began an association with other black artists living in New York, and met rich, white patrons of the arts willing to support her work.
In the fall of 1925, through scholarships arranged for her, Hurston was able to enter Barnard College, the women's division of Columbia University. This experience was critical to her developement, primarily because she was able to work with Franz Boas and other famous anthropologists. Hurston's interest in anthropology as an area of study seems always to have been coupled with her desire to understand and present the African-American folklore which surrounded her life in Eatonville. At the same time she was living inNew York City and participating in the very exciting social life of black artists, writers, and musicians, she was also telling Eatonville stories and studying theories of anthropology that allowed her to understand the rich folklife of her earlier years.
In February, 1927, Hurston boarded a southbound train from New York City to central Florida, where she intended to conduct field work for the next six months, supported by a research fellowship from Columbia University. Her intention was to record the songs, customs, tales, superstitions, jokes, dances, and games of African American folklore. This material, which she collects and works with periodically throughout the next several years, becomes Mules and Men, published in 1935. Meanwhile, using the same source material, Hurston also writes essays and musicals, and in 1934 publishes her first novel, Jonah's Gourd Vine.
Hurston's interest in and success with the folk material she collected in Florida led her to continue her anthropological work, and in 1936 she headed to the West Indies with a Guggenheim fellowship to study religious practices in Jamaica and Haiti. While in Haiti and collecting folk material, Hurston also wrote her most famous novel, Their Eyes Were Watching God, published in September, 1937. Set in Florida, this novel tells the story of Janie Mae Crawford, a girl who has been raised by her grandmother, marries a man she does not love, runs off and marries a man who, she finds out, is using her, finally meets the man of her dreams, and in the end loses him to death and returns home alone and fulfilled. The story contains many examples of folk speech, or the black english dialect, and also many folk tales. It is also a love story, at the same time it is a story about a woman who finds her own independence. The comtemporary writer, Alice Walker, says of Their Eyes Were Watching God: "There is no book more important to me than this one."
While Hurston continued to publish novels, essays, and short stories, it was becoming increasingly difficult for her to find the financial backing for this work, in large part because the country was suffering through the Great Depression. By 1950, she was forced to take a job as a maid, the kind of work she had done as a young woman, in order to support herself. In this last decade of her life her heath also began to deteriorate. She worked as a librarian and as a substitute teacher, all the while continuing her writing projects, but in 1959 she suffered a stroke that left her weak and mentally impaired. On January 18, 1960, she died at the Saint Lucie County Welfare Home, clearly without money or family or old friends. Her funeral was paid for by local friends and aquaintances who had taken up a collection, and Hurston was buried in an unmarked grave in the Garden of Heavenly Rest, an all-black cemetery in Fort Pierce, Florida.
In 1973, however, having read Hurston's work and been profoundly influenced by it and by Hurston's life, the writer Alice Walker traveled to Florida to visit the Eatonville that Hurston had made famous, and to find Hurston's grave. In the essay she writes about this trip, she describes finding what might be Hurston's grave, then purchasing a gravestone and having it placed where Hurston was buried. The gravestone is inscribed, "Zora Neale Hurston/ 'A Genius of the South'/ 1901---1960/ Novelist, Folklorist/ Anthropologist." Hurston's legacy lives on, and her writings are now available for all of us to read.