Zora Neale Hurston

Zora Neale Hurston was best known for her novels and different collections of folklore. She was a writer who associated with the Harlem Renaissance that celebrated the African American culture of the south. Her first novel, “Their Eyes Were Watching God”, was a best-selling novel in 1937.

Zora Neal Lee Hurston was born on January 7, 1891 in Eatonville, Florida. She was the fifth of the eight children to Lucy Ann Potts and John Hurston (“Zora Hurston” 3). Her mother had died in 1904 when she was thirteen. She dropped out of school after her death. When young Zora had seen her older sister, Sara hurt and rejected, she having bad attitudes because of her new stepmother. A few years later, Zora got into a physical fight with her stepmother causing her father to be on his daughter’s side.

When young Zora’s school wasn’t paid well, she was put to work by scrubbing the floors and working in the kitchen. It was an only way for her to do in order for her to continue her education. While staying with her older brother, Bob, Zora had befriended with a white woman. She had like Zora as a friendly and sisterly way. When the white woman had heard about a job opening as a maid to a singer, she wanted Zora to apply for the job (Lutz 7). At the age of sixteen, she had decided to join the job in a traveling theatrical show when they ended up in New York during the Great Depression (“Zora Neale” 1).

In 1918, Hurston had spent two years at Morgan before she graduated. She did well on all of her classes, except for math. She continued to finish Morgan so she can get easily transfer from high school to college (Lutz 8). For the first time in her life after many years, Hurston didn’t have any financial problems. She had arrived in New York in 1925 ...

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...hat taught them survive racial oppression (Kaplan 5).

Hurston had a psychological motivation to present for the black culture. She had drawn the materials for her novels for the rural, and most of her southern black life she had known as a young child and recorded folklore by collecting trips during the late 1920s and 1930s (Kaplan 5).

Works Cited

“Hurston, Zora Neale.” World Book Online Info Finder. World Book, 2014. Web. 28 Apr. 2014

“Hurston, Zora Neale.” Britannica Biographies. Encyclopedia Britannica, Inc. 1994-2012 Web. 2

May 2014.

Zora Neale Hurston, Cambridge: American Women Playwrights, 1900-1950.

Kaplan, Deborah. Ed. “Zora Neale Hurston”. Critical Survey of Long Fiction, Fourth Edition. New York: Salem Press, 2010.

Lutz, Norma Jean eds. Harold Bloom. “Biography of Zora Neale Hurston. Bloom’s Biocritiques. New York: InfoBase Publishing, 2003.