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Zora Neale Hurston was the most published black female author in her time and arguably the most important collector of African-American folklore ever. She achieved moderate success during the Harlem Renaissance as a short story writer, although her stories deserve attention beyond the concerns of black or feminist literature because oftheir local color and strong characterization. She has been described by her biographer, Robert E. Hemenway, as “flamboyant and yet vulnerable, self-centered and yet kind, a Republican conservative and yet an early black nationalist.” Her stories reflect this complexity.

Works in Biographical and Historical Context

Facts Mixed with Fiction

No record of Hurston’s birth exists, but, as she wrote in her autobiography, Dust Tracks on a Road (1942), she ”heard tell” she was born on January 7, 1903, in Eatonville, Florida, one of eight children. Hurston used 1903 most often but variously gave the year as 1900, 1901, and 1902. Hurston scholars Hemenway and Alice Walker use 1901. Modern attempts to establish an accurate record of her birth point toward an earlier birth year and a different location (Alabama), though it is unknown if Hurston’s various accounts were deliberate fiction or errors. According to her own account, Hurston’s parents, Lucy Ann Potts, a country schoolteacher, and John Hurston, a carpenter and Baptist preacher, met and married in Alabama, then moved to Eatonville three years before Hurston’s birth.

At fourteen, Hurston left Eatonville, working as a maid for whites, but she refused to act humble or to tolerate sexual advances from male employers. Consequently, she never stayed at one job long. Hired as a wardrobe girl with a Gilbert and Sullivan repertory theater company, she traveled around the South for eighteen months, always reading in hopes of completing her education. Later she enrolled in a Baltimore high school, Morgan Academy (now Morgan State University), while working as a live-in maid. In 1918, she entered Howard University, paying for her expenses by working as a barbershop manicurist and as a maid for prominent blacks.

Launching Her Literary Career

Hurston’s literary career began at Howard. She joined the literary society (sponsored by Alain Locke), which published her first story, ”John Redding Goes to Sea,” in the club’s literary magazine, Stylus, in May 1921. In January 1926, it was republished in Opportunity: A Journal of Negro Life, a new magazine for beginning black writers. In May 1925, Hurston won second prize in an Opportunity-sponsored contest for her short story ”Spunk,” and at the awards banquet met several influential people who furthered her career. One important person who befriended Hurston was Annie Nathan Meyer, a novelist and a founder of Barnard College, who arranged for Hurston to attend Barnard on scholarship. She entered in the fall of 1925 as its first black student.

”Black Death,” a companion piece to ”Spunk,” was never published in its original short story form, even though it won an honorable mention in the prestigious 1925 Opportunity contest and was considered for inclusion in the groundbreaking anthology The New Negro (1925). The story was rewritten as an article about Eatonville hoodoo men entitled ”Hoodoo in America” and published in the October-December 1931 issue of Journal of American Folklore, the nation’s most respected folklore journal. Undoubtedly, Hurston mixed folklore reports and fiction in both versions, having become skillful at blending the folklore of many generations with her imaginative storytelling.

Becoming a Folklorist

”Eatonville Anthology” was published in three installments in the Messenger. This series of fourteen brief sketches, some only two paragraphs long, illustrates her artistic use of cultural experiences, fusing folklore studies with fiction. These self-contained tales include glimpses of a woman beggar, an incorrigible dog, a backwoods farmer, the village’s greatest liar, and a cheating husband. They become an appropriate transition to mark the end of her short stories of the 1920s and the beginning of her work as folklorist. An English major at Howard, she took anthropology courses at Barnard and, on the merit of an excellent paper, came to the attention of anthropologist Franz Boas. She worked as his apprentice after graduating with a BA degree in 1928, accepting a fellowship he arranged for her so she could record ”the songs, customs, tales, superstitions, lies, jokes, dances, and games of Afro-American folklore” in the South.

Hurston had done considerable work collecting folklore and historical material in the four years after she graduated from college. It appears as though Hurston was at the crossroads with dual careers as a writer and folklorist/anthropologist. She was unsuccessful in her attempt to enter Columbia University to study for a PhD in 1934, at which point she published her first novel, Jonah’s Gourd Vine, and, a year later, her first collection of folklore, Mules and Men. Hence, her fiction allowed her to affirm more forcefully the rich humanistic values of black life as opposed to the scientific objectivity of her anthropological studies. Collecting folklore gave her a new perspective as a storyteller of black culture; thus, studying anthropology both analytically and emotionally enriched her literary career.

Writing Her Best Fiction

Seven years after the publication of the ”Eatonville Anthology” sketches, Hurston returned to her Eatonville remembrances in ”The Gilded Six-Bits,” originally published in Story Magazine and later her most frequently anthologized story. In the 1930s, Hurston produced the novel Their Eyes Were Watching God (1937), written in Haiti in seven weeks, and considered to be her best work. Her autobiography, Dust Tracks on a Road (1942), her most successful publication, gave a partially accurate, partially fictionalized account ofher life. In the following years, she made many attempts to receive funding for folklore research trips to Central America. Finally, an advance on a new novel allowed her to travel in 1947 to British Honduras, where she completed Seraph on the Suwanee (1948), her last book. In 1959, she suffered a stroke, leaving her unable to care for herself adequately. Wracked with pain, she continued to labor at a three-hundred-page manuscript about Herod the Great. Against her will, she entered the St. Lucie County Welfare Home in October 1959. She died of hypertensive heart disease on January 28, 1960.

Works in Literary Context

Hurston was devoted to her career as a folklorist and used the stories she collected to enliven and inspire her writing. Blending folk tales and fiction became a trademark of the famous author and a style that is now synonymous with her name. In works such as ”The Fire and the Cloud” (1934) and Hoodoo in America (1931), Hurston’s perspective as a storyteller of black culture really shines. As a leader of the Harlem Renaissance, she received some critical attention for her promotion of African-American folklore, dance, and language. She continues to be one of the movement’s most famous members.

Folklore

Folklore refers to the traditional beliefs, myths, tales, and practices of a people that have been spread in an informal manner—usually orally, although in modern times the Internet has become a pivotal source for folklore. Folklore may also be used to define the comparative study of folk knowledge and culture. First coined by William J. Thomas in 1846, ”folklore” was conceived as a simple term to replace various phrases common at the time which described the same concept. Folklore, then, replaced such awkward descriptions as ”the lore of the people,” ”popular antiquities,” and ”the manners, customs, observances, superstitions, ballads, proverbs, etc., of the olden times.”

Harlem Renaissance

The Harlem Renaissance was an artistic and cultural revolution that took place in Harlem, New York, between the World Wars. Instead of using more direct political means, African-American artists and writers used culture to promote civil rights and equality. As a result, jazz and African-American paintings and books were absorbed into mainstream culture. Hurston was closely associated with the movement and has influenced such writers as Ralph Ellison, Toni Morrison, and Alice Walker. 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.”

Works in Critical Context

Hurston’s work of folklore, Mules and Men, focuses on her excursions to the South and is regarded as the best and most important book of its kind. Its pages are filled with what many consider the integral ingredients of America’s black culture: stories, or ”big old lies,” songs, superstitions, and even ”formulae of Hoodoo Doctors.” Hurston’s masterpiece and the book she is most identified with is her novel Their Eyes Were Watching God, the jewel that Hurston cut from her Eatonville experience. It is the story of a young black woman, Janie, following her through three very different relationships and her transformation into a self-sufficient, whole human being. In the novel, Janie learns that there are ”two things everybody’s got tuh do fuh theyselves. They got tuh go tuh God, and they got tuh find about livin’ fuh theyselves.”

Mules and Men

In his New York Times Book Review from November 10,1935, H. I. Brock wrote of Mules and Men, ”The book is packed with tall tales rich with flavor and alive with characteristic turns of speech.” Other critics found similar value in the book. Henry Lee Moon wrote in his December 11, 1935 New Republic review,

Mules and Men is more than a collection of folklore. Miss Hurston records things as they were told to her, in an intimate and good style; and the intimacy she established with her subjects, she reproduces on the printed page, enabling the reader to feel himself a part of that circle.

Their Eyes Were Watching God Hurston’s best known novel was given rave reviews at its time of publication. In her 1937 review for the New York Times Book Review, Lucille Tompkins wrote, ”This is Zora Hurston’s third novel, again about her own people—and it is beautiful. . . . Indeed, from first to last this is a well nigh perfect story.” That same year, Sheila Hibben praised the novel in the New York Herald Tribune Weekly Book Review. She wrote that ”Miss Hurston can write of [Negroes] with simple tenderness, so that her story is filled with the ache of her own people,” and calls Hurston an author who writes with her head as well as with her heart.”

References

Hemenway, Robert E. Zora Neale Hurston: A Literary Biography. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1977.
———. Zora Neale Hurston and the Eatonville Anthropology.” The Harlem Renaissance Remembered, edited by Arna Bontemps. New York: Dodd, Mead, 1972.
Barksdale, Richard and Keneth Kinnamon. Black Writers of America: A Comprehensive Anthology. New York:Macmillan, 1972.
Bloom, Harold, ed. Zora Neale Hurston. New York:Chelsea House, 1986.
Bone, Robert. Down Home: A History of Afro-American Short Fiction From Its Beginnings to the End of the Harlem Renaissance. New York: Putnam’s, 1975.
Davis, Arthur P. From the Dark Tower: Afro-American Writers, 1900-1960. Washington, D.C.: Howard University Press, 1974.
Holloway, Karla F. The Character of the Word: The Texts of Zora Neale Hurston. New York: Greenwood Press, 1987.
Howard, Lillie P. Alice Walker and Zora Neale Hurston. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1993.
The Zora Neale Hurston Digital Archive. Contemporary Reviews.” Retrieved October 2, 2008, from http://www.zoranealehurston.ucf.edu/contemporaryreviews.php.
American Folklore. Folklore Definitions: What is Folklore?” Retrieved October 2, 2008, from http://www.americanfolklore.net/what-is-folklore.html.