Zora Neale Hurston was born on January 7, 1891. Hurston was a novelist, short story writer, and anthropologist who was among the major figures of the Harlem Renaissance.

Hurston was born in Alabama, but her family moved to Eatonville, Florida when she was three. Eatonville was one of the first all-black towns to be incorporated in the United States, and the Hurstons became one of its most prominent families. Hurston’s father was elected mayor in 1897, and became the minister of the town’s largest church in 1902.

Hurston was sent to boarding school in Jacksonville, but had to leave before graduating when her father was unable to pay her tuition. She was unable to resume her education until 1917, when she lied about her age in order to qualify for a free high-school education at Morgan College in Baltimore.

She began studies at Howard University in 1918, and was one of the founders of the university’s student newspaper. She wasn’t able to afford full-time study, and left Howard in 1924. She was offered a scholarship the following year at Barnard College, the women’s college at Columbia University, where she was the only black student.

Hurston received her bachelor’s degree in anthropology in 1928, and went on to two years of graduate study at Columbia. That study included anthropological research in the southern United States, gathering folk tales. She published Mules and Men (e-book | e-audio | book), a collection of those tales, in 1935; more of that work was discovered in the Smithsonian archives and published posthumously in 2001 as Every Tongue Got to Confess (e-book | e-audio | book).

On returning to New York, Hurston worked for a few years in theater. She co-wrote a play, Mule Bone (print), with Langston Hughes; the two had a major falling-out during the writing, and the play wasn’t produced until 1991. Hurston also produced several short-lived musical revues based on the folktales she’d gathered; Anthea Kraut’s Choreographing the Folk (print) looks at Hurston’s work as a choreographer in those revues.

Her first novel, Jonah’s Gourd Vine (e-book | print), was published in 1934. It’s a semi-autobiographical story focusing on a philandering minister not unlike her father. Hurston published two more novels in the 1930s. The book for which she is best remembered today is Their Eyes Were Watching God (e-book | e-audio | print | audio), in which a 40-something woman looks back on her life from adolescence to the present day. Moses, Man of the Mountain (e-book |print) re-tells the Biblical Exodus story from an African-American perspective.

Hurston returned to anthropological research in the mid-1930s, spending two years studying voodoo in Haiti and Jamaica. That research was published in 1938’s Tell My Horse (e-book | print).

Hurston published a memoir, Dust Tracks on a Road (e-audio | print), in 1942, and her final novel, Seraph on the Suwanee (print), in 1948. It was her only novel to focus principally on white characters, and it was poorly received by both critics and the public.

In her final years, Hurston often struggled financially. She took what jobs she could find, working as a maid, and occasionally as a substitute teacher. She died of a stroke on January 28, 1960, in a Florida welfare home, and was buried in an unmarked grave. In 1973, Alice Walker paid to have a tombstone placed on the unmarked grave that was believed to be Hurston’s.

In the 1950s and 1960s, Hurston’s work fell largely into oblivion. Her conservative political leanings were out of step with the developing civil rights movement, and many younger writers were bothered by Hurston’s use of African-American dialect in her dialogue.

The revival of interest in Hurston’s work began in 1975, with Alice Walker’s essay in Ms. Magazine, “Looking for Zora,” in which she argued that the literary world was “throwing away a genius” in dismissing Hurston. Robert Hemenway’s 1977 biography of Hurston (print) furthered the interest, and Their Eyes Were Watching God was re-issued in 1978.

Her place in the American literary canon was made clear in 1995, when the Library of America gathered her writing in two volumes, one containing her four novels and selected short stories (print), and the other her two major anthropological works, her memoir, and selected essays (print).

New work by Hurston is still being discovered. In 1927, she interviewed Cudjoe Lewis, the last known survivor of the last illegal slave ship to enter the United States—that is, the last survivor of the trans-Atlantic slave trade. Those interviews were published in 2018 as Barracoon (e-book | e-audio | print | audio); the title is the Spanish word for the barracks where Africans were held before being transported to America.

Several biographies of Hurston have been written. Valerie Boyd’s Wrapped in Rainbows (e-book | print) is the most comprehensive biography; Yuval Taylor’s Zora and Langston (e-book | e-audio | print) focuses on Hurston’s friendship with Langston Hughes. Peter Bagge’s Fire!! (print) presents her life in graphic novel form. Jump at the Sun is the title of the PBS American Masters documentary on Hurston (streaming | DVD), and of Kathleen McGhee-Anderson’s biographical play, recorded in radio format by Los Angeles Theatre Works (e-audio | audio).

Their Eyes Were Watching God was adapted in 2005 as a TV-movie starring Halle Berry, Michael Ealy, and Ruby Dee.

Also This Week

January 12, 1856

John Singer Sargent was born. Sargent was the child of American parents, born in Florence, Italy, and he lived most of his life in Europe. He became one of the most acclaimed portrait painters of his generation. His 1884 Portrait of Madame X caused a scandal when it was exhibited in Paris, because it depicted a woman wearing a dress with one strap off the shoulder, which was considered highly suggestive and overly erotic at the time. Sargent later overpainted the portrait to put the strap back on the woman’s shoulder. Deborah Davis tells the story of the scandal in Strapless (e-book | print).

January 11, 1885

Alice Paul was born. Paul was one of the leader of the American women’s suffrage movement. She was an organizer of two major events of that campaign. In 1913, about 8,000 women marched in Washington, DC, the day before Woodrow Wilson’s inauguration; and in 1917, Paul led a months-long campaign of daily protest and picketing, the first political demonstrations to be held at the White House. Paul’s campaigns are the subject of Tina Cassidy’s Mr. President, How Long Must We Wait? (e-book | e-audio | print | audio).

January 9, 1938

Karel Čapek was born. Čapek was a Czech writer who worked in several genres, but is best remembered today for two works of science fiction. The 1936 novel War With the Newts (e-book | print), one of the first dystopian novels, is a dark satire about the discovery of a race of intelligent newts; the 1920 play R.U.R. (Rossum’s Universal Robots) (e-book | print) introduced the word “robot,” though Čapek’s characters are not robots in the modern sense of mechanical beings, but artifically created biological lifeforms.

January 6, 1960

Nigella Lawson was born. Lawson is a cookbook author and television food host. She is not a trained chef, and emphasizes that she cooks for pleasure; she chooses the recipes that will appear in her books based on whether she’d like to eat that dish again. Lawson describes her on-air personality as “intimate, not flirtatious.” Her most recent book is At My Table (e-book | print ).