Zora Neale Hurston — People — Black-History.com

Zora Neale Hurston grew up in the all-Black town of Eatonville, Florida, trained as an anthropologist under Franz Boas at Barnard College, and spent her career recording the speech, stories, and beliefs of Black Southerners and Caribbean people in both fieldwork and fiction. Her novel Their Eyes Were Watching God (1937) is now a fixture of American literature, but she died in poverty, and her reputation was rebuilt only after Alice Walker’s 1975 essay in Ms. magazine.

At a Glance

Born: 7 January 1891, Notasulga, Alabama
Died: 28 January 1960, Fort Pierce, Florida
Known for: Mules and Men (1935); Their Eyes Were Watching God (1937); Dust Tracks on a Road (1942); Barracoon (published 2018)
HBCU ties: Morgan State University (Completed high school at Morgan Academy, the preparatory department of Morgan College, 1918); Howard University (Associate degree, 1920); Bethune-Cookman University (Established a school of dramatic arts, 1934); North Carolina Central University (Taught drama at the North Carolina College for Negroes, 1939)
Fields: Literature · Science
Era: Letters, Arts & Sciences

Early Life

Hurston was born on 7 January 1891, the fifth child of John Hurston, a Baptist preacher, carpenter, and tenant farmer, and Lucy Potts Hurston, a schoolteacher. Her birthplace has been claimed for both Notasulga, Alabama, and Eatonville, Florida; most scholars now accept Notasulga. She herself routinely gave later birth years, and when she returned to school as an adult she shaved roughly a decade off her age.

While she was a toddler the family moved to Eatonville, one of the first incorporated all-Black towns in the United States, where her father later served as mayor. The town’s front-porch storytelling became the foundation of her writing. Her mother died in 1904, and Hurston was sent to boarding school in Jacksonville. After her father remarried she lived with relatives, supported herself as a domestic worker and as a maid with a traveling theater troupe, and eventually joined a brother in Baltimore. She finished high school at the Morgan Academy there in June 1918.

Life and Work

Hurston entered Howard University and completed an associate degree in 1920, publishing her first short story in the campus literary magazine. In 1925 she moved to New York, won recognition in the literary contest of the National Urban League’s magazine Opportunity, and joined the circle of Harlem Renaissance writers that included Langston Hughes and Wallace Thurman, with whom she produced the single issue of Fire!! in 1926. A scholarship took her to Barnard College, where she studied with the anthropologist Franz Boas and received her B.A. in 1928; by most accounts she was the college’s only Black student during her time there.

With Boas’s encouragement she returned to the South to collect folklore, funded from 1927 by the wealthy patron Charlotte Osgood Mason. In 1927 and 1928 she interviewed Cudjo Lewis, known in Africa as Kossola, in the Africatown community near Mobile, Alabama. Lewis had been brought to the United States in 1860 aboard the Clotilda, the last documented slave ship to reach the country. Hurston completed a book-length account of his life in 1931, but publishers declined it, in part because it kept his dialect; it was finally published as Barracoon: The Story of the Last “Black Cargo” in 2018.

The 1930s were her most productive decade. She published the novel Jonah’s Gourd Vine (1934), based on her parents’ marriage, and Mules and Men (1935), a collection of African American folktales and hoodoo practices from Florida and Louisiana. In 1935 she joined Alan Lomax and Mary Elizabeth Barnicle on a Library of Congress folk-song recording trip through Georgia and Florida. A 1930 collaboration with Langston Hughes on the folk comedy Mule Bone collapsed in a dispute over authorship that ended their friendship. In 1934 she established a school of dramatic arts at Bethune-Cookman College. A Guggenheim Fellowship awarded in April 1936, when newspapers noted she was the only African American among that year’s recipients, took her to Jamaica and then Haiti, and in Haiti she wrote Their Eyes Were Watching God in about seven weeks. The novel, published in 1937, follows Janie Crawford’s search for selfhood through three marriages and is told largely in the voices of Black Floridians. Its dialect and lack of overt protest drew criticism from Richard Wright and others. Tell My Horse (1938) recorded her Caribbean research, and Moses, Man of the Mountain (1939) retold the Exodus story in African American idiom.

In 1938 she worked for the Federal Writers’ Project in Florida, and in 1939 she taught drama at the North Carolina College for Negroes in Durham. Her autobiography, Dust Tracks on a Road (1942), won the Saturday Review’s Anisfield-Wolf Book Award. Her final novel, Seraph on the Suwanee (1948), centered on white characters. That same year she was arrested on a false accusation of molesting a young boy; the charge was dismissed, but coverage in the Black press devastated her.

Legacy

Hurston spent her last decade in Florida, working as a freelance writer, a substitute teacher, and at times a maid; in 1952 she covered the Ruby McCollum murder trial for the Pittsburgh Courier. Her political views, including opposition to the Brown v. Board of Education decision, isolated her further. After a stroke she entered the St. Lucie County Welfare Home in Fort Pierce, where she died of heart disease on 28 January 1960. She was buried in an unmarked grave in the town’s segregated Garden of Heavenly Rest cemetery.

Her books had gone out of print when the novelist Alice Walker located the approximate burial site, placed a headstone reading “A Genius of the South,” and published “In Search of Zora Neale Hurston” in Ms. in March 1975. Robert Hemenway’s literary biography followed in 1977, and Their Eyes Were Watching God became one of the most widely taught American novels. Eatonville has held an annual Zora! Festival since 1990, and her work is now recognized as a foundation of Black women’s literature and of the anthropology of the African diaspora.

For Educators

Zora Neale Hurston treated the everyday speech, stories, and beliefs of Black Southerners as worthy of serious study and great art, and her fall into obscurity and later recovery show how literary reputations are made. Open the classroom lesson →

Key Dates

7 January 1891 Born in Notasulga, Alabama; the family soon moves to Eatonville, Florida.
June 1918 Completes high school at Morgan Academy in Baltimore.
1925 Moves to New York and enters Barnard College.
1927 Begins interviews with Cudjo Lewis (Kossola) in Africatown, Alabama.
1928 Graduates from Barnard with a B.A. after study with Franz Boas.
1935 Publishes Mules and Men.
1936 Awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship for research in Jamaica and Haiti.
1937 Publishes Their Eyes Were Watching God.
1942 Publishes her autobiography, Dust Tracks on a Road.
28 January 1960 Dies in Fort Pierce, Florida.

Sources and Further Reading

Encyclopedia of Alabama, “Zora Neale Hurston.” Link
National Women’s History Museum, “Zora Neale Hurston.” Link
Zora Neale Hurston, Dust Tracks on a Road (Philadelphia: J. B. Lippincott, 1942).
Robert E. Hemenway, Zora Neale Hurston: A Literary Biography (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1977).
Valerie Boyd, Wrapped in Rainbows: The Life of Zora Neale Hurston (New York: Scribner, 2003).
Library of Congress, “Zora Neale Hurston: Topics in Chronicling America.” Link

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By the Black-History.com editors. Last reviewed 30 September 2026. To suggest a primary source or a correction, write to editors@black-history.com or use our corrections form.