Download Hurston, Zora Neale

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HURSTON, ZORA NEALE
1891?–60, African-American writer
LIFE
African-American writer, b. Notasulga, Ala. She grew up in the pleasant allblack town of Eatonville, Fla. and, moving north, graduated from Barnard
College, where she studied with Franz Boas. Her placid childhood and
privileged academic background are often cited as major reasons for her
work's general lack of stress on racism, a characteristic so unlike such
contemporaries as Richard Wright. An anthropologist and folklorist, Hurston
collected African-American folktales in the rural South and sympathetically
interpreted them in the collections Mules and Men (1935) and Tell My Horse
(1938). A third volume of tales, Every Tongue Got to Confess, was discovered
in manuscript and published in 2001. Hurston, a significant figure in the
Harlem Renaissance, was also the author of four novels including Jonah's
Gourd Vine (1934) and the influential Their Eyes Were Watching God (1937).
Her plays include the comedy Mule Bone (1931), written in collaboration with
her friend Langston Hughes
LIFE CONT.
Originally called the New Negro Movement, the Harlem Renaissance was a
literary and intellectual flowering that fostered a new black cultural identity in
the 1920s and 1930s. Critic and teacher Alain Locke described it as a "spiritual
coming of age" in which the black community was able to seize upon its "first
chances for group expression and self determination."
With racism still rampant and economic opportunities scarce, creative
expression was one of the few avenues available to African Americans in the
early twentieth century. Chiefly literary—the birth of jazz is generally
considered a separate movement—the Harlem Renaissance, according to
Locke, transformed "social disillusionment to race pride."
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