84 Facts About Zora Neale Hurston

Zora Neale Hurston was an American author, anthropologist, and filmmaker.

Zora Neale Hurston portrayed racial struggles in the early-1900s American South and published research on hoodoo.

Zora Neale Hurston wrote more than 50 short stories, plays, and essays.

Zora Neale Hurston later used Eatonville as the setting for many of her stories.

Zora Neale Hurston had an interest in African-American and Caribbean folklore, and how these contributed to the community's identity.

Zora Neale Hurston wrote fiction about contemporary issues in the Black community and became a central figure of the Harlem Renaissance.

Zora Neale Hurston's novels went relatively unrecognized by the literary world for decades.

Zora Neale Hurston's father was a Baptist preacher and sharecropper, who later became a carpenter, and her mother was a school teacher.

Zora Neale Hurston was born in Notasulga, Alabama, on January 7,1891, where her father grew up and her paternal grandfather was the preacher of a Baptist church.

Zora Neale Hurston said that Eatonville was "home" to her, as she was so young when she moved there.

Zora Neale Hurston later described this personal literary awakening as a kind of "birth".

Zora Neale Hurston lived for the rest of her childhood in Eatonville and described the experience of growing up there in her 1928 essay, "How It Feels To Be Colored Me".

Zora Neale Hurston's mother died in 1904, and her father subsequently married Mattie Moge in 1905.

Zora Neale Hurston graduated from the high school of Morgan State University in 1918.

In 1918, Zora Neale Hurston began her studies at Howard University, a historically black college in Washington, DC.

Zora Neale Hurston was one of the earliest initiates of Zeta Phi Beta sorority, founded by and for black women, and co-founded The Hilltop, the university's student newspaper.

Zora Neale Hurston took courses in Spanish, English, Greek, and public speaking and earned an associate degree in 1920.

Zora Neale Hurston left Howard in 1924, and in 1925 was offered a scholarship by Barnard trustee Annie Nathan Meyer to Barnard College of Columbia University, a women's college, where she was the sole black student.

Zora Neale Hurston worked with Ruth Benedict and fellow anthropology student Margaret Mead.

Zora Neale Hurston had met Charlotte Osgood Mason, a philanthropist and literary patron, who became interested in her work and career.

Zora Neale Hurston had supported other African-American authors, such as Langston Hughes and Alain Locke, who had recommended Hurston to her; however, she tried to direct their work.

In return, she wanted Zora Neale Hurston to give her all the material she collected about Negro music, folklore, literature, hoodoo, and other forms of culture.

Zora Neale Hurston's apartment, according to some accounts, was a popular spot for social gatherings.

Around this time, Zora Neale Hurston had a few early literary successes, including placing in short-story and playwriting contests in Opportunity: A Journal of Negro Life, published by the National Urban League.

In 1927, Zora Neale Hurston married Herbert Sheen, a jazz musician and a former teacher at Howard; he later became a physician.

In 1935, Zora Neale Hurston was involved with Percy Punter, a graduate student at Columbia University.

Zora Neale Hurston inspired the character of Tea Cake in Their Eyes Were Watching God.

In 1939, while Zora Neale Hurston was working for the WPA in Florida, she married Albert Price.

Zora Neale Hurston twice lived in a cottage in Eau Gallie, Florida: in 1929 and again in 1951.

In 1934, Zora Neale Hurston established a school of dramatic arts "based on pure Negro expression" at Bethune-Cookman University, a historically black college in Daytona Beach, Florida.

In 1956, Zora Neale Hurston received the Bethune-Cookman College Award for Education and Human Relations in recognition of her achievements.

In later life, in addition to continuing her literary career, Zora Neale Hurston served on the faculty of North Carolina College for Negroes in Durham.

Zora Neale Hurston traveled extensively in the Caribbean and the American South and immersed herself in local cultural practices to conduct her anthropological research.

Zora Neale Hurston was researching lumber camps in north Florida and commented on the practice of white men in power taking black women as concubines, including having them bear children.

Zora Neale Hurston drew from this material as well in the fictional treatment she developed for her novels such as Jonah's Gourd Vine.

In 1935, Zora Neale Hurston traveled to Georgia and Florida with Alan Lomax and Mary Elizabeth Barnicle for research on African American song traditions and their relationship to slave and African antecedent music.

Zora Neale Hurston was tasked with selecting the geographic areas and contacting the research subjects.

In 1936 and 1937, Zora Neale Hurston traveled to Jamaica and Haiti for research, with support from the Guggenheim Foundation.

Zora Neale Hurston drew from this research for Tell My Horse, a genre-defying book that mixes anthropology, folklore, and personal narrative.

In 1938 and 1939, Zora Neale Hurston worked for the Federal Writer's Project, part of the Works Progress Administration.

From May 1947 to February 1948, Zora Neale Hurston lived in Honduras, in the north coastal town of Puerto Cortes.

Zora Neale Hurston expressed interest in the polyethnic nature of the population in the region.

Zora Neale Hurston believed that might have been related to Dr Adams' alleged involvement in the gambling operation of Ruby's husband Sam McCollum.

Zora Neale Hurston's articles were published by the newspaper during the trial.

Zora Neale Hurston had a special assignment to write a serialized account, The Life Story of Ruby McCollum, over three months in 1953 in the newspaper.

Zora Neale Hurston's part was ended abruptly when she and Nunn disagreed about her pay, and she left.

Unable to pay independently to return for the appeal and second trial, Zora Neale Hurston contacted journalist William Bradford Huie, with whom she had worked at The American Mercury, to try to interest him in the case.

Zora Neale Hurston covered the appeal and second trial, and developed material from a background investigation.

Zora Neale Hurston shared her material with him from the first trial, but he acknowledged her only briefly in his book, Ruby McCollum: Woman in the Suwannee Jail, which became a bestseller.

Zora Neale Hurston firmly believed that Ruby McCollum's testimony sounded the death toll of 'paramour rights' in the Segregationist South.

Zora Neale Hurston was fired for being "too well-educated" for her job.

At age 60, Zora Neale Hurston had to fight "to make ends meet" with the help of public assistance.

Zora Neale Hurston died of hypertensive heart disease on January 28,1960, and was buried at the Garden of Heavenly Rest in Fort Pierce, Florida.

Zora Neale Hurston's remains were in an unmarked grave until 1973.

In 1927, Zora Neale Hurston traveled to the Deep South to collect African-American folk tales.

Zora Neale Hurston interviewed Cudjoe Kazzola Lewis, of Africatown, Alabama, who was the last known survivor of the enslaved Africans carried aboard Clotilda, an illegal slave ship that had entered the US in 1860, and thus the last known person to have been transported in the Transatlantic slave trade.

Zora Neale Hurston did add new information about daily life in Lewis' home village of Bante.

Zora Neale Hurston intended to publish a collection of several hundred folk tales from her field studies in the South.

Zora Neale Hurston wanted to have them be as close to the original as possible but struggled to balance the expectations of her academic adviser, Franz Boas, and her patron, Charlotte Osgood Mason.

In 1929, Zora Neale Hurston moved to Eau Gallie, Florida, where she wrote Mules and Men.

Zora Neale Hurston had a strong belief that folklore should be dramatized.

In 1937, Zora Neale Hurston was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship to conduct ethnographic research in Jamaica and Haiti.

Zora Neale Hurston's last published novel, Seraph on the Suwanee, notable principally for its focus on white characters, was published in 1948.

In 1952, Zora Neale Hurston was assigned by the Pittsburgh Courier to cover the small-town murder trial of Ruby McCollum, the prosperous black wife of the local bolita racketeer, who had killed a racist white doctor.

Zora Neale Hurston contributed to Ruby McCollum: Woman in the Suwannee Jail, a book by journalist and civil rights advocate William Bradford Huie.

In 2008, The Library of America selected excerpts from Ruby McCollum: Woman in the Suwannee Jail, to which Zora Neale Hurston had contributed, for inclusion in its two-century retrospective of American true crime writing.

In Chapter XV of Dust Tracks on a Road, entitled "Religion", Zora Neale Hurston expressed disbelief in and disdain for both theism and religious belief.

Zora Neale Hurston investigated voodoo, going so far as to participate in rituals alongside her research subjects.

Zora Neale Hurston's work slid into obscurity for decades, for both cultural and political reasons.

The use of African-American dialect, as featured in Zora Neale Hurston's novels, became less popular.

Also, Zora Neale Hurston had made stylistic choices in dialogue influenced by her academic studies.

Several of Zora Neale Hurston's literary contemporaries criticized her use of dialect, saying that it was a caricature of African-American culture and was rooted in a post-Civil War, white racist tradition.

Zora Neale Hurston had become disenchanted with Communism, but he used the struggle of African Americans for respect and economic advancement as both the setting and the motivation for his work.

In 1951, for example, Zora Neale Hurston argued that New Deal economic support had created a harmful dependency by African Americans on the government and that this dependency ceded too much power to politicians.

Zora Neale Hurston criticized communism in her 1951 essay titled Why the Negro won't Buy Communism and she accused communists of exploiting African-Americans for their own personal gain.

Zora Neale Hurston's views on communism, the New Deal, civil rights, and other topics contrasted with the views of many of her colleagues during the Harlem Renaissance, such as Langston Hughes, who was a supporter of the Soviet Union and praised it in several of his poems during the 1930s.

Zora Neale Hurston criticized what she described as "Race Pride and Race Consciousness", describing it as a "thing to be abhorred", stating:.

In 1952, Hurston supported the presidential campaign of Senator Robert A Taft.

Zora Neale Hurston shared his opposition to Roosevelt and Truman's interventionist foreign policy.

Zora Neale Hurston felt that if separate schools were truly equal, educating black students in physical proximity to white students would not result in better education.

Zora Neale Hurston voiced this opposition in a letter, "Court Order Can't Make the Races Mix", that was published in the Orlando Sentinel in August 1955.

Zora Neale Hurston is described as a "trailblazer for black women's empowerment" because of her numerous individual achievements and her strong belief that black women could be "self-made".

Zora Neale Hurston observed that she admitted to inventing dialogue for her book Mules and Men in a letter to Ruth Benedict and described fabricating the Mules and Men story of rival voodoo doctors as a child in her later autobiography.

Hemenway does not claim that this undermines the validity of her later fieldwork: he states that Zora Neale Hurston "never plagiarized again; she became a major folklore collector".