Title: Zora Neale Hurston Biography - life, family, childhood, story, school, mother, young, book, old, information, born
Headings: Zora Neale Hurston Biography
Zora Neale Hurston Biography
Childhood
Early career
Hurston's writings
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Content: Also in 1943 she was given an alumni award from Howard University. Hurston's writings
Hurston's most famous work is her novel Their Eyes Were Watching God (1937), in which she created the portrait of an African American  female, Janie, growing into adulthood searching for her identity. Through a series of marriages Janie comes to know and define herself in  terms of her relationship with whites. For several years after the  novel's publication critics saw this work as a sentimental love  story. However, if the novel is read with the understanding that love  was the traditional way in which a woman was supposed to find  self-fulfillment (completing oneself), then love can be seen as the  vehicle for emotional, spiritual, and intellectual development. The  novel also portrays the awakening of a woman's sexuality. With  the women's movement of the 1970s and the growth of female  awareness that followed, many critics cited this novel as the central  text in the canon (list of the best) of literature by African American  women writers, specifically, and by women writers in general. Hurston was also a famous folklorist who applied her academic training  to collecting African American folklore around her home-town in Florida. This work produced two collections of folklore, Mules and Men (1935) and Tell My Horse (1939). All of her work is characterized by her use of African American  folk idioms (regional speech), which are important to her character  portrayals.