A Brief Biography Of Zora Neale Hurston

Zora Neale Hurston is well known for her work as an author, but what people don’t know about her is that things weren’t always easy. Throughout her childhood she constantly found herself packing up and moving between relatives, and she was never able to return to the place she truly loved (Lillios). However, everything she went through in her early years contributed to her success later on in her life. Many details of Hurston’s books, specifically Their Eyes Were Watching God, are closely connected to events that actually occurred, perhaps part of the reason why they seem so believable. Elements of Hurston’s life preceding her success as an author are what inspired several aspects of her work and possible subsidized her present-day significance.

Zora Neale Hurston was born in 1891 in Alabama, although since she moved to Eatonville, Florida when she was just a little girl, she considers that her home (Boyd). Her mother was a schoolteacher before she decided to center her life on her eight children, and her father was a priest who also served as mayor of the town for three terms (Lillios). Hurston truly loved Eatonville and would have stayed there her entire life if she could, but her fairy tale came to an end at the age of thirteen when her mother tragically passed away (Boyd). Her father soon remarried to a much younger woman who Zora was never very fond of, getting in to fist fights with her from time to time (Boyd). As a result of her father not paying much attention to his children, Zora was forced to leave home and go stay with her relatives in other parts of the country (Boyd).

The next several years for Huston consisted of working, most commonly as a maid, instead of what she truly wanted to do: go to school (Lillios). Unl...

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...even stated, “Janie had spent most of the day under a blossoming pear tree in the back-yard” just thinking about it (Hurston 10). Very similarly to Hurston, Janie went through several men before she found the right one that she truly loved, and in both instances he happened to be a much younger man (The Big Read).

Easy is a word that doesn’t come anywhere close to describing Zora Neale Hurston’s life in any way. She worked harder than most people could ever dream of working because she knew what she wanted to do and she wasn’t going to let anybody slow her down. Her childhood was a very difficult time for her and most people in her situation would have let it ruin them, but she decided to turn it around for the best. She took all of the bad things that she went through in her early life and used it towards her success by incorporating it into her work as an author.