Aouthor Profile

Zora Neale Hurston
Early Life:
huston was the fifth of the eight children of john hurston and Luey Ann Hurston (nee potts). Her father was a baptist preacher, tenant famer, and carpenter, and her mother was a school teacher. Though Hurston claimed as an adult that she was born in Eatonville, Florida in 1901, she was actually born in Notasulga, Alabama in 1891, where her father grew up and her grandfather was the united states, when she was three. Her father later became mayor of the town which Hurston would glorify in her stories as a place black Americans could live as they desire, independent of white society.

College:
in 1918, Hurston began undergranduate studies at Howard University, where she became one of the earliest Zeta Phi Beta Sorority ans co-founded the Hilltop, the University's student newpaper. Hurston left Howard in 1924 and in 1925 was offered a scholarship to Barnard College where she was the College's sole black student, Hurston received her B.A. in anthropolgy in 1927, when she was 36. While she was at Barnard, she conducted ethnographic research with noted anthropologist Franz Boas of Columbia Universitey she also worked with Ruth Benedict as well as fellow anthropologhy student Margaret Mead.

Adulthood:
As an adult, Hurston traveled extensively in the Caribbean and the American South and immersed herself in local cultural practies to conduct her anthropological research in 1927, she married Herbert Sheen, a jazz musician and former classmate at Howard who would later become a physician, but the marriage ended in 1931. In 1939, while Hurston was working for the WPA, she married Albert Price, a 23-year-old fellow WPA employee, and 25 years her junior but this marriage ended after only a few months. In later life, in addition to continuing her literary career, Hurston served on the facutly of North Carolina College for Negroes (now North Carolina University) in Durham, North Carolina.

Death:
During a period of financial and medical difficulties, Hurston was forced to enter St. Lucie County Welfare Home, where she suffered a stroke and died of hypertensive heart disease. She was buried in an unmarked grave in the Garden of Heavenly Rest cemetery in Fort Pierce in 1973 African-American novelist Alice Walker and literary scholar Charlotte Hunnt found an unmarked grave in the general area where Hurston had been buried and decided to mark it as hers.

Literary career
1920s

When Hurston arrived in New York City in 1925, the Harlem Renaissance was its peak, and coon became one of the writers at its center. Shortly before she entered Barnaed, Hurston's short story "spunk" was selected for the New Negro, a landmark anthology of fiction, poetry, and essays focusing on African and African American are and literature. In 1926, a group of young black writers including Hurston Langston Hughes, and Wallace Thurman, calling themselves the Niggerati, produced a literary magazine called fire!! that featured many of the young artists and writers of the Harlem Renaissance.