Zora Neale Hurston "A Genius of the South" Novelist, Folklorist and Anthropologist - Her Legacies

"I have the nerve to walk my own way, however hard, in my search for reality, rather than climb upon the rattling wagon of wishful illusions." - Letter from Zora Neale Hurston to Countee Cullen.

Zora Neale Hurston (1891-1960 one of the pre-eminent writers of twentieth-century African-American literature student loan consolidation a star of the Harlem Renaisance was called "one of the greatest writers of our time" by Toni Morrison. A distinguished author and anthropologist, she celebrated and preserved her African-American culture in both her scientific research and in her fiction.

Although all of her books appeared in the 1930's, Zora Neale Hurston was undoubtedly a product of the Harlem Renaissance. She was as well, one of the most extraordinary writers. Some readers might have first encountered her as a rather disconcerting figure in Langston Hughes's autobiography The Big Sea where she is depicted as a somewhat eccentric even occasionally bizarre character with the nerve to approach strangers in Harlem and measure their heads as part of an anthropological inquiry.

Zora Neale Hurston knew how to make an entrance. On May 1, 1925, at a literary awards dinner sponsored by Opportunity magazine, the earthy Harlem newcomer turned heads and raised eyebrows as she claimed four awards: a second-place fiction prize for her short story "Spunk," a second-place award in drama for her play Color Struck, and two honorable mentions.

The names of the writers who beat out Hurston for first place that night would soon be forgotten. But the name of the second-place winner- her very Viagra FAQ - buzzed on tongues all night, and for days and years to come. Lest anyone forget her, Hurston made a wholly memorable entrance at a party following the awards dinner. She strode into the room--jammed with writers and arts patrons, black and white--and flung a long, richly colored scarf around her neck with dramatic flourish as she bellowed a reminder of the title of her winning play: "Colooooooor Struuckkkk!" Her exultant entrance literally stopped the party for a moment, just as she had intended. In this way, Hurston made it known that a bright and powerful presence had arrived. By all accounts, Zora Neale Hurston could walk into a roomful of strangers and, a few minutes and a few stories later, leave them self cert loans completely charmed that they often found themselves offering to help her in any way they could.

Gamely accepting such offers--and employing her own talent and scrappiness--Hurston became the most successful and most significant black woman writer of the first half of the 20th century. Over a career that spanned more than 30 years, she wrote and published four acclaimed novels including her most famous novel, quick quote car insurance Eyes Were Watching God, two books of anthropology and folklore, an autobiography, numerous short stories, and several essays, articles and plays.

Born on Jan. 7, 1891, in Notasulga, Alabama, Hurston moved with her family to Eatonville, Florida, when she was still a toddler, within the first year or two of her life. This all-black Eatonville, community, shaped her life and her writing to a significant degree. John Hurston, her father, was a carpenter and a preacher and was several times elected mayor of their town. Her writings, however, reveal no recollection of her Alabama beginnings. For Hurston, Eatonville was always home. During her life Zora Neale Hurston claimed her birth date as January 7, 1901 and her birth place as Eatonville, Florida. Actually she was born on that date in the year 1891 in Notasulga, Alabama.

In Hurston's autobiography she addresses this issue with characteristic aplomb: "This is all hearsay. Maybe some of the details of my birth, as told me might be a little inacccurate but it is pretty well established that I really did get born."

For years, misled by Hurston herself, scholars set the year of her birth as 1891, when in fact she was born a decade earlier on January 7, 1901.

Established in 1887, the rural community near Orlando, the nation's first incorporated black township was, as Hurston described it, "a city of five lakes, three croquet courts, three hundred brown skins, three hundred good swimmers, plenty guavas, two schools, and no jailhouse."

In Eatonville, Zora was never indoctrinated in inferiority, and she could see the evidence of black achievement all around her. Looking towards the town hall she could see black men, including her father, John Hurston, formulating the laws that governed Eatonville. From the Sunday Schools of the town's two churches she saw 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.

Unlike many Southern towns where African Americans lived under the constant spectre of racial harassment or discrimination from their white neighbours, in Eatonville whites only passed through on the road to Orlando.

Growing up in this culturally affirming setting in an eight-room house on five acres of land, Zora had a relatively happy childhood, despite frequent clashes with her preacher-father, who sometimes sought to "squinch" her rambunctious spirit, she recalled. Her mother, on the other hand, urged young Zora and her seven siblings to "jump at de sun." Hurston explained, "We might not land on the sun, but at least we would get off the ground."

John Hurston, the author's father, a carpenter and a preacher was several times elected mayor of their town.

Growing up in such a town where she was surrounded by black culture and self-sufficient black people was fundamental to her work. It was to this organic African-American community that she kept returning as an adult - literally for her anthropological research on black folklore, and figuratively in her fiction and autobiographical writing. The absence of whites here, according to Hurston herself, not only kept Eatonville free of racism but also freed blacks to express themselves without reservation.

Hurston's idyllic childhood came to an abrupt end, though, when her mother, Lucy, died in 1904. Zora was only 13 years old. She remembered in her autobiography that in her family she was the one who encouraged her to jump at de sun. "That hour began my wanderings," she later wrote. "Not so much in geography, but in time. Then not so much in time as in spirit." But even before this Hurston had been experiencing much pain and unease as her parents' marriage was being marred by tension, not least of all because of her father's many infidelities.

After Lucy Hurston's death, Zora's father remarried quickly--to a young woman whom the young Zora didn't take very well to and clashed repeatedly with. On one of such occasions the hotheaded Zora almost killed her in a fistfight. Her father now seemed to have little time or money for his children. "Bare and bony of comfort and love," Zora worked a series of menial jobs over the ensuing years, struggled to finish her schooling. Apparently, Hurston left school and was being shuffled back and forth between relatives. Zora then left home to work for a traveling theatre company. She eventually joined a Gilbert & Sullivan traveling troupe as a personal maid to the lead singer, who was a kindly white actress. In 1917, she turned up in Baltimore; by then, she was 26 years old and still hadn't finished high school. Needing to present herself as a teenager to qualify for free public schooling, she took 10 years off her life--giving her age as 16 and the year of her birth as 1901.

Once gone, those years were never restored: From that moment forward, Hurston would always present herself as at least 10 years younger than she actually was. Apparently, she had the looks to pull it off. Photographs reveal that she was a handsome, big-boned woman with playful yet penetrating eyes, high cheekbones, and a full, graceful mouth that was never without expression. Her further education came off very slowly and sporadically. It was embarrassment over this that partly led her to lie about her age. So having dropped her age she succeeded in resuming school in Baltimore. In 1917 she attended Morgan Academy in Baltimore to finish high school. She thus earned the high school diploma from Morgan Academy in 1918. She then took courses at Howard University sporadically between 1918 and 1924. While studying she kept working as a manicurist to support herself.

What was most likely her first published story 'John Redding Goes to Sea" appeared in Stylus, Howard University's literary magazine in 1921.

In Washington D.C., she came to know such eminent literary figures as Alain Locke and George Douglas Johnson. Locke paved the way for her migration to New York when he urged her to submit 'Drenched in Light' to the editor of Opportunity, Charles S. Johnson, who published her story there in December 1924. In 1925 she had already moved to New York where she soon became part of the convergence of African American writers, artists and musicians in Harlem which became known as the Harlem Renaissance -- attending parties with other notable African American writers such as Langston Hughes, Jessie Fauset, and Arna Bontemps.

She became an immediate success in Harlem literary circles. Alain Locke chose her short story"Spunk" for inclusion in the landmark 1925 anthology The New Negro. She soon became established as one of the brightest of the young artists in Harlem. Her short play Color Struck and her story "Spunk" brought her to the attention of the novelist Fannie Hurst and the philanthropist Annie Nathan Meyer. Hurst hired Hurston thus in her early years in New York Hurston worked as an donating car to writer Fanny Hurst. Mayer enabled her to attend Barnard College.

Zora who had a fiery intellect, an infectious sense of humor, and "the gift," as one friend put it, "of walking into hearts." used these talents--and dozens more--to elbow her way into the Harlem Renaissance of the 1920s, befriending such luminaries as poet Langston Hughes and popular singer/actress Ethel Waters. Though Hurston rarely drank, fellow writer Sterling Brown recalled, "When Zora was there, she was the party." Another friend remembered Hurston's apartment--furnished by donations she solicited from friends--as a spirited "open house" for artists.

Hurston apparently cut quite a figure in Harlem society, her hat perched jauntily on her head, as she regaled groups with her tales of Eatonville, Florida and shocked others with her outrageous behavior which included such social excesses as smoking in public. All this socializing didn't keep Hurston from her work, though. She would sometimes write in her bedroom while the party went on in the living room.

Hurston received a scholarship to study anthropology at Barnard College, the only black student then attending,. At Barnard she studied anthropology. Her particular interest was in the area of folklore, and her background in Eatonville provided her both with rich data for scholarly study and fine raw material for her writing. Over the next several years Hurston would travel in the south, interviewing storytellers in Florida and Hoodoo doctors in New Orleans, all of which would feed into her writing.

She received a B.A. in 1928 for research that focused on black folklore. Her papers were passed on to Franz Boas, undoubtedly the foremost figure in anthropology in the United States at the time. Boas who was at that time at Columbia University was so impressed by her work that he convinced her to start graduate study in anthropology at Columbia.

Hurston was in turn thrilled by Boa's interest in the folktales (known to herself and the people who told them simply as 'lies') that had kept her spellbound as a child. With a fourteen hunded dollar grant and Boa's intellectual and moral support, Hurston returned to her native South.

Through the support of the wealthy, elderly white woman who also befriended and aided Hughes and Alain Locke as well as other writers and artists, Hurston was able to gather the material that would later comprise 'Mules and Men" (1935) the first known collection of Africaan American folklore to be compiled and published by an African American. Mules and Men received mixed reviews with some black critics complaining that it was too easy on whites. Sterling A. Brown for instance charged that her collection was "too pastoral" and would have been "nearer the truth" if it had been "more bitter." Nevertheless the book was still a popular success.

Her second book of folklore Tell My Horse (1938) which she began after joining the Depression-inspired Works Progress Administration in 1935 was less successful. Many readers were disappointed to find that the purported collection of folklore actually emphasizes a comparison between the interracial barriers in black America and those in the Caribbean and makes relatively short shrift of the delightful tales that had made her first collection so delightful.

Hurston's trip to the Caribbean was also important in that during her stay there she completed her second and finest novel Their Eyes Were Watching God(1937)

By 1935, Hurston had published several short stories and articles, as well as a novel (Jonah's Gourd Vine) and a well-received collection of black Southern folklore (Mules and Men).

But the late 1930s and early '40s marked the real zenith of her career. She published her masterwork, Their Eyes Were Watching God, in 1937; Tell My Horse, her study of Caribbean Voodoo practices, in 1938; and another masterful novel, Moses, Man of the Mountain, in 1939. Alice Walker writes of Their Eyes Were Watching God, generally considered to be Hurston's most powerful novel, thus, "There is no book more important to me than this one" (Hemenway xiii). It is the story of Janie Crawford, a woman who defines the parameters of her life and loves in opposition to the small-town mores of Eatonville. Moses, Man of the Mountain, Hurston's third novel, is a compelling rewriting of the biblical book of Exodus in the style of African-American southern vernacular.

Their Eyes Were Watching God celebrates the individual's triumph over the limitations imposed on her mainly by sexism and poverty. Jane Crawford's ultimate attainment of contentment is based squarely on a mature understanding of life and of the acknowledgement of forces superior even to romantic love, which can blind women to the necessity of seeking emotional and intellectual independence as individuals in a complex world.

One of Hurston's early works was the play Mule Bone, a comedy she wrote with Langston Hughes. Drawing from folk culture, Hurston and Hughes were trying to create an African-American comedy that did not depend on black stereotypes but came out of black rural life. Sadly, the authors due to a misunderstanding over who owned the text of the play had their friendship damaged beyond repair. The play itself was not published in its entirety until 1991.

Hurston's first published book, Jonah's Gourd Vine, was a fictional work set in a small all-black Florida town which focused on the lives of two people remarkably like her parents.

In her second book, Mules and Men, Hurston published what she found in her trips in the south. She worked for a number of years on this book until it was both highly expressive of the cultures she was writing about and geared toward a popular reading level. This is no turgid academic text and outshines her later anthropological work Tell My Horse.

A new stage in Hurston's career and reputation started with the publication of her popular autobiography Dust Tracks on a Road in 1942 which led to the controversies and misconceptions concerning her. Dust Tracks on a Road, has proved to be the most enigmatic of her works. In what Robert Hemenway describes as "a [sometimes] discomfiting book," Hurston seems to evade race as a significant aspect of identity in American society, advocating instead "a personal transcendence of racial realities". This text displays a conservatism in the author which increased with time. Even though her publishers had specifically requested an autobiography from her, he refused to publish it because of several potentially objectionable passages in which she indicts white America for its hypocrisies and racism. So Dust Tracks on a Road, published in 1942 without those passages, brought Hurston finally the well-earned acclaim that had long eluded her. That year, she was profiled in Who's Who in America, Current Biography and Twentieth Century Authors. It won her the Anisfield-Wolf Award for its contribution to the improvement of race relations. But she also earned the contempt of many black critics who considered it an unconscionably cheery portrayal of the life experiences of a black woman in America. Dust Tracks on the Road thus failed for these critics at least precisely where Their Eyes Were Watching God had succeeded.

Hurston, nevertheless, found herself being solicited for articles by numerous magazines. Soon she was appearing in such publications as The Saturday Evening Post, Reader's Digest, American Mercury, World Telegram and Negro Digest. Her views were sometimes contradictory. In an article from 1943 she wrote that "the Jim Crow system works" but claimed just less than three years later that she was "all for the repeal of every Jim Crow law" in the nation here and now. Aambivalence towards her deepened as the 1940's were on.

She was probably relieved and a little surprised when on publishing another novel, Seraph on the Suwanee, in 1948 it sold well. The last of her works that was published in her lifetime, Seraph on the Suwanee, focusing on the marriage of a white couple, seems a long stretch from her roots in Eatonville.

What might have been the beginning of a second phase in her career was cut short by a personal calamity. In September 1948 she was arrested on a charge of having committed an immoral act with a ten-year-old-boy. The fact that she had been out of the country at the time the crime was supposedly committed was not enough to keep the story out of the newspapers. So Hurston was humiliated seriously as seen in her testimony:

My race has seen fit to destroy me without reason, and with the vilest tools conceived of by man so far.

She never recovered from this and wrote little in the remaining twelve years of her life.

Inspite of the large volume of her work, Hurston never received the financial rewards she deserved. (The largest royalty she ever earned from any of her books was $943.75.) So when she died on Jan. 28, 1960--at age 69, after suffering a stroke--her neighbors in Fort Pierce, Florida, had to take up a collection for her February 7 funeral. The collection didn't yield enough to pay for a headstone, however, so Hurston was buried in a grave that remained unmarked until 1973.

That summer, in 1973 a young writer named Alice Walker traveled to Fort Pierce to place a marker on the grave of the author who had so inspired her own work. Walker found the Garden of Heavenly Rest, a segregated cemetery at the dead end of North 17th Street, abandoned and overgrown with yellow-flowered weeds.

Back in 1945, Hurston had foreseen the possibility of dying without money--and she'd proposed a solution that would have benefited her and countless others. Writing to W.E.B. Du Bois, whom she called the "Dean of American Negro Artists," Hurston suggested "a cemetery for the illustrious Negro dead" on 100 acres of land in Florida. Citing practical complications, Du Bois wrote a curt reply discounting Hurston's persuasive argument. "Let no Negro celebrity, no matter what financial condition they might be in at death, lie in inconspicuous forgetfulness," she'd urged. "We must assume the responsibility of their graves being known and honored."

As if impelled by those words, Walker bravely entered the snake-infested cemetery where Hurston's remains had been laid to rest. Wading through waist-high weeds, she soon stumbled upon a sunken rectangular patch of ground that she determined to be Hurston's grave. Unable to afford the marker she wanted--a tall, majestic black stone called "Ebony Mist"--Walker chose a plain gray headstone instead. Borrowing from a Jean Toomer poem, she dressed the marker up with a fitting epitaph: "Zora Neale Hurston: A Genius of the South." By Valerie Boyd

From Darwin Turner's early and scathing criticisms of her work to Hemenway's balanced praise and Alice Walker's enthusiasm, Zora Neale Hurston has been the subject of intense critical attention since her "re-discovery" in the late 'sixties.

The most prolific African-American woman writer of her time or earlier, the power of her imagery and the richness of the culture which she brings to life through her writings have found her enthusiastic new audiences in recent years. Hurston herself was unable to make a living from her writings and worked as a teacher, a librarian and a domestic in order to earn her livelihood. She spent her later years in Florida, continuing to write articles which were published in various local and national venues and three additional novels which were rejected for publication.

Her death in 1960 in a welfare home in Fort Pierce, Florida, went largely unnoticed by the world as she was buried in an unmarked grave.. Her work as well had fallen into obscurity.

Thirteen years later in 1973, during a time when Hurston's eminence was finally being recognized, Alice Walker discovered her unmarked grave and placed a marker in the field where Hurston lay. The gravestone reads:

Zora Neale Hurston

"A Genius of the South"

1901[sic] -- 1960

Novelist, Folklorist

Anthropologist

She then introduced Hurston's work to a new generation of readers and scholars. Since then, Hurston's position in American literature as a writer who movingly portrays an African-American culture that was on the verge of disappearing, gender relationships that feature women as equal to men, and characters who exhibit "racial health," in the words of Alice Walker has been restored.

All of Hurston's major works are in print. In addition, during the past six years the following three new posthumous works have been published: two volumes of folk tales and miscellaneous works-Every Tongue Got to Confess: Negro Folk-Tales from the Gulf States and Go Gator and Muddy the Water: Writings by Zora Neale Hurston from the Federal Writers' Project-and a collection of Hurston's letters, Zora Neale Hurston: A Life in Letters, edited by Carla Kaplan.

The University of Central Florida Hurston Archive has created an academic web site that provides a repository of biographical, critical, and contextual materials related to Hurston's life and work located just a few miles from Hurston's hometown of Eatonville thus giving it unique access to people who knew Hurston and historical documents related to her work in Florida.

In 1975, Ms. Magazine published Alice Walker's essay, "In Search of Zora Neale Hurston" reviving interest in the author. Hurston's four novels and two books of folklore resulted from extensive anthropological research and have proven invaluable sources on the oral cultures of African America.

Through her writings, Robert Hemenway wrote in The Harlem Renaissance Remembered, Hurston "helped to remind the Renaissance--especially its more bourgeois members--of the richness in the racial heritage."

Zora Neale Hurston's nfluence could be seen in such writers as Ralph Ellison, Toni Morrison, Gayle Jones, Alice Walker, and Toni Cade Bambara.

Selected Bibliography

Works by the Author

Jonah's Gourd Vine (1934)

Mules and Men (1935)

Their Eyes Were Watching God (1937)

Tell My Horse (1938)

Moses, Man of the Mountain (1939)

Dust Tracks on a Road (1942)

Seraph on the Suwanee (1948)

I Love Myself: When I Am Laughing ... and Then Again When I Am Looking Mean and Impressive: A Zora Neale Hurston Reader (1979) (edited by Alice Walker; introduction by Mary Helen Washington) (1979)

The Sanctified Church: The Folklore Writings of Zora Neale Hurston (1981) (edited by Alice Walker; introduction by Mary Helen Washington)

Spunk: The Selected Stories of Zora Neale Hurston (1985)

Mule Bone: A Comedy of Negro Life, with Langston Hughes (1991) edited with introductions by George Houston Bass and Henry Louis Gates, Jr., and the complete story of the Mule bone controversy.) (1991)

Color Struck (1925) in Opportunity Magazine

Sweat (1926)

How It Feels to Be Colored Me (1928)

Hoodoo in America (1931) in The Journal of American Folklore

The Gilded Six-Bits (1933)

The Complete Stories (introduction by Henry Louis Gates, Jr. and Sieglinde Lemke) (1995)

Barracoon (1999) Novels & Stories: Jonah's Gourd Vine, Their Eyes Were Watching God, Moses, Man of the Mountain, Seraph on the Suwanee, Selected Stories (Cheryl A. Wall, ed.) (Library of America, 1995)

Folklore, Memoirs, & Other Writings: Mules and Men, Tell My Horse, Dust Tracks on a Road, Selected Articles (Cheryl A. Wall, ed.) (Library of America, 1995

Zora Neale Hurston, "Court Order Can't Make the Races Mix"

Zora Neale Hurston: Jump at the Sun.

Works about the Author

Abcarian, Richard and Marvin Klotz. "Zora Neale Hurston." In Literature: The Human Experience, 9th edition. New York: Bedford/St. Martin's, 2006: 1562-3.

Awkward, Michael, ed. New Essays on Their Eyes Were Watching God. New York: Cambridge UP, 1990

Baym, Nina (ed.) "Zora Neale Hurston." In The Norton Anthology of American Literature, 6th edition, Vol. D. New York, W. W. Norton & Co 2003: 1506-1507.

Beito, David T. "Zora Neale Hurston," American Enterprise (6 September/October 1995), 61-3.

Beito, David T. and Beito, Linda Royster, "Isabel Paterson, Rose Wilder Lane, and Zora Neale Hurston on War, Race, the State, and Liberty." Independent Review 12 (Spring 2008).

Bloom, Harold, ed. Zora Neale Hurston. New York: Chelsea House P, 1986.

Carter-Sigglow, Janet. Making Her Way With Thunder: A Reappraisal of Zora Neale Hurston's Narrative Art. New York: P. Lang, 1994.

Gates, Henry Louis Jr. and K. A. Apiah, eds. Zora Neale Hurston: Critical Perspectives Past and Present. New York, Amistad, 1993.

Foster, Shivonne Following Footsteps: Zora Neale Hurston, The Hilltop, November 20, 2007.

Glassman, Steve and Kathryn Lee Seidel, eds. Zora in Florida. Orlando: U of Central Florida P, 1991.

Hemenway, Robert E. Zora Neale Hurston: A Literary Biography. Urbana: U of Illinois P, 1977.

Hemenway, Robert E. "Zora Neale Hurston." In The Heath Anthology of American Literature, 5th edition, Vol. D. Paul Lauter and Richard Yarborough (eds.). New York: Houghton Mifflin Co., 2006: 1577-1578.

Holloway, Karla F. C. The Character of the Word: The Texts of Zora Neale Hurston. Westport, CT: Greenwood P, 1987.

Howard, Lillie P. Zora Neale Hurston. Boston: Twayne P, 1980.

Howard, Lillie P., ed. Alice Walker and Zora Neale Hurston: The Common Bond. Westport, CT: Greenwood P, 1993.

Kraut, Anthea, "Between Primitivism and Diaspora: The Dance Performances of Josephine Baker, Zora Neale Hurston, and Katherine Dunham," Theatre Journal 55 (2003): 433-50.

Lowe, John. Jump at the Sun: Zora Neale Hurston's Cosmic Comedy. Urbana: U of Illinois P, 1994.

Lyons, Mary. Sorrow's Kitchen: The Life and Folklore of Zora Neale Hurston. New York: Scribner's, 1990.

McKissack, Patricia and Fredrick. Zora Neale Hurston, Writer and Storyteller. Hillside, NJ: Enslow P, 1992.

Menefee, Samuel Pyeatt, "Zora Neale Hurston (1891-1960)." In Women and Tradition: A Neglected Group of Folklorists Hilda Ellis Davidson and Carmen Blacker (eds.). Durham, NC, Carolina Academic Press, 2000: 157-72.

Newson, Adele S. Zora Neale Hurston: A Reference Guide. Boston: G. K. Hall, 1987.

Plant, Deborah G. Every Tub Must Sit on its Own Bottom: The Philosophy and Politics of Zora Neale Hurston. Urbana: U of Illinois P, 1995.

Porter, A. P. Jump at De Sun: The Story of Zora Neale Hurston. Minneapolis: Carolrhoda Books, 1992.

Tucker, Cynthia. "Zora! Celebrated Storyteller Would Have Laughed at Controversy Over Her Origins. She Was Born In Notasulga, Alabama but Eatonville Fla., Claims Her As Its Own", Atlanta Journal and Constitution, January 22, 1995.

Turner, Darwin T. In a Minor Chord: Three Afro-American Writers and Their Search for Identity. Carbondale: Southern Illinois UP, 1971.

Visweswaran, Kamala. Fictions of Feminist Ethnography. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1994.

Walker, Alice. "In Search of Zora Neale Hurston", Ms. Magazine, (March 1975): 74-79, 84-89.

Wright, Richard "Between Laughter and Tears", The New Masses, October 5, 1937.

State Library and Archives of Florida

o Sound recordings of Hurston in the 1930's

o Zora Neale Hurston, the WPA in Florida, and the Cross City Turpentine Camp

The Zora Neale Hurston Digital Archive - University of Central Florida

Voices from the Gaps biography - University of Minnesota

Zora Neale Hurston from the Concise Dictionary of American Literary Biography

Works by Zora Neale Hurston at Project Gutenberg

Zora Neale Hurston Trust, operated by Lucy Anne Hurston (Zora Neale Hurston's niece)

Zora Neale Hurston: The Howard University Years, Valerie Boyd, 'The Journal of Blacks in Higher Education', No. 39 (Spring, 2003), pp. 104-108

Zora Neale Hurston at the Internet Movie Database

Zora Neale Hurston Festival of the Arts and Humanities (ZORA! Festival) Zora Neale Hurston, Women in History.

ZORA'S ROOTS: Barnard College Premieres PBS Documentary on the Life of Zora Neale Hurston '28, Barnard College.

Zora Neale Hurston, American Author A page by Tim Gallaher which focuses on the elements of voodoo in Hurston's works.

NPR: "Zora Neale Hurston, Through Family Eyes" An interview with Zora Neale Hurston's niece, Lucy Ann Hurston. Lucy is an ethnographer and public speaker and is dedicated to promoting and educating others on her aunt's contributions.

Born and schooled in Freetown, Sierra Leone, Arthur Smith has taught English for over thirty years at various Educational Institutions. He is now a Senior Lecturer of English at Fourah Bay College where he has been lecturing for the past eight years.

Mr Smith's writings have been in various media. He participated in a seminar on contemporary American Literature in the U.S. in 2006. His growing thoughts and reflections on this trip which took him to various US sights and sounds could be read at lisnews.org.

His other publications include: Folktales from Freetown, Langston Hughes: Life and Works Celebrating Black Dignity, and 'The Struggle of the Book'