ZORA
NEALE HURSTON
Zora Neale Hurston was born in Alabama in 1891 and is regarded as one of the leading figures of the Harlem Renaissance.
She was a novelist, anthropologist, playwright, stage director, and essayist. The Pulitzer Prize–winning author of The Color Purple, Alice Walker, rediscovered Hurston’s work, after which she came to be widely recognized as one of the most vibrant and imaginative voices in American literature.
Zora Neale Hurston was a groundbreaking and iconoclastic writer, widely admired by readers and respected by authors such as Maya Angelou, Zadie Smith, and Paul Beatty. Toni Morrison regarded her as one of the greatest writers of our time.
She was known for her views on atheism and her belief in the social integration of Black and white communities. Although her role in the Harlem Renaissance was significant, her work was largely overlooked during her lifetime.
Interest in her writing revived in the 1970s after an article by Alice Walker, and her novel Their Eyes Were Watching Godbecame one of the most widely read works of African American literature. It is now considered a landmark text celebrating independent womanhood and resistance to oppression.
Her major works also include Mules and Men (1935), an anthology of African American folklore from Northern Florida, and Tell My Horse (1938), a study of rituals and spiritual traditions in Jamaica and Haiti.