Zora Neale Hurston: Re-Writing What Was Expected

Author, folklorist and anthropologist Zora Neale Hurston wrote her way into African-American history after becoming the most successful African-American female writer of the Harlem Renaissance. Her repertoire of more than 30 years includes four published novels, two books of folklore, an autobiography, numerous short stories, and several essays, articles and plays, according to ZoraNealeHurston.com.

Born in 1891, Hurston grew up inEatonville,Fla., one of the first all-black towns formed in American after the Civil War. It was here that Hurston found her sense of African-American pride intend of inferiority. Here she “could see the evidence of black achievement all around her. She could look to town hall and see black men, including her father, John Hurston, formulating the laws that governed Eatonville. She could look to the Sunday Schools of the town’s two churches and see black women, including her mother, Lucy Potts Hurston, directing the Christian curricula. She could look to the porch of the village store and see black men and women passing worlds through their mouths in the form of colorful, engaging stories,” her website explains.

In 1918 at the age of 26, Hurston attended Howard University where she co-founded the university’s newspaper, “The Hilltop” and became one the earliest initiates of Zeta Phi Beta Sorority. Upon receiving a scholarship to Barnard College, Hurston left Howard University to become the only African-American student at Barnard. It was here that she began her work in ethnography and earned her Bachelor’s degree in anthropology. She went on to get her graduate’s degree in anthropology at Columbia University.

By 1935 Hurston had published various articles and short stories of folklore but her career didn’t skyrocket until 1937 when she published the novel “Their Eyes Were Watching God.” The novel follows “the story of Janie Crawford’s evolving selfhood through three marriages. Janie is one black woman who doesn’t have to live lost in sorrow, bitterness, fear, or foolish romantic dreams, instead Janie proclaims that she has done “two things everbody’s got tuh do fuh theyselves. They got tuh go tuh God, and they got tuh find out about livin’ fuh theyselves.”,” according to ZoraNealeHurston.com.

Initially Hurston’s novel gained negative reviews from male readers due to the idea of an independent Black women illustrated throughout the novel but now, it has become one of the most widely read and highly acclaimed novels in African-American literature. In 2005 the novel was even adapted into a TV movie produced by Oprah Winfrey and starring Halle Berry and Michael Ealy.

Hurston writings have gone on to inspire other writers like Alice Walker and Gayle Jones. Through her work she has “helped to remind the Renaissance–especially its more bourgeois members–of the richness in the racial heritage,” scholar of African-American literature Robert Hemenway wrote in “The Harlem Renaissance Remembered.”

-Alexandria Richard