Zora Neale Hurston: Reflection In Her Work

Authors get their ideas on paper in many ways. They can use their imagination making up everything from thin air. They can use their past experiences or experiences that others relate to them. A better explanation about how authors end up writing what we read is best clarified by an author themselves. Ursula Le Guin an American novelist explains, “I don't believe that a writer "gets" (takes into the head) an "idea" (some sort of mental object) "from" somewhere, and then turns it into words, and writes them on paper. The stuff has to be transformed into oneself, it has to be composted, before it can grow into a story.” If that is too complicated to understand we have the help of Robertson Davis a Canadian novelist who says, “I don't get them (ideas) they get me.” We may not ever know completely as readers how stories are created, but we can see that daily life influences everyone. This is no different for authors. What authors encounter in their daily life can easily influence what they write about. After reading some stories by Zora Neale Hurston, one can see how much the era she lived in had an effect in her writing. Her short stories “The Glided-Six Bits" and “Sweat” portray signs of The Great Depression and poverty life that was present during Hurston’s time.

Hurston lived through a sad historical event in American history: The Great Depression. The Great Depression was a period of worldwide economic depression that lasted from 1929 until approximately 1939. The starting point of the Great Depression is usually listed as October 29, 1929, commonly called Black Tuesday. This was the date when the stock market fell dramatically 12.8%. Herbert Hoover was president at the beginning of the Great Depression. He tried to institute re...

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Hurston, Zora. “Sweat”. The Story and Its Writer: An Introduction to Short Fiction. 8th Edition. Ann Charters. Boston: Bedford/St. Martin’s, 2011. 564-572. Print.

Hurston, Zora. “The Gilded Six-Bits”. The Story and Its Writer: An Introduction to Short Fiction. 8th Edition. Ann Charters. Boston: Bedford/St. Martin’s, 2011. 556-564. Print.

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