Title: Fascinating Facts About Zora Neale Hurston | Mental Floss
Headings: 9 Fascinating Facts About Zora Neale Hurston
9 Fascinating Facts About Zora Neale Hurston
1. Zora Neale Hurston’s most recent book was published 61 years after her death.
2. Zora Neale Hurston’s out of print work was revived more than a decade after her death.
3. Alice Walker pretended to be Zora Neale Hurston’s niece while searching for her unmarked grave.
4. Alice Walker had the wrong birth year engraved on Zora Neale Hurston’s gravestone.
5. Zora Neale Hurston set many of her works in her hometown of Eatonville, Florida—except it wasn’t her hometown.
6. Zora Neale Hurston was the first Black woman to graduate from Barnard College.
7. Zora Neale Hurston interviewed the last known survivor of the transatlantic slave trade.
8. Zora Neale Hurston's best-known novel was met with serious criticism.
9. Their Eyes Were Watching God garnered major acclaim more than 40 years after its publication.

Content: Hurston, a central figure of the Harlem Renaissance, was at the height of her literary career in the 1930s. But adulation turned to derision with the publication of Their Eyes Were Watching God in 1937. The story of Janie Crawford, a young, working-class Black woman, and her “ ever maturing sense of self through three marriages,” the novel faced intense criticism from Hurston’s male peers and critics. Its depiction of a small, Southern town where everyday life did not include lynchings, abuse, or endless back-breaking labor led some to accuse Hurston of whitewashing the racial status quo and pandering to white audiences by perpetuating the minstrel tradition. In a 1937 review of the book, Native Son author Richard Wright wrote: "Miss Hurston voluntarily continues in her novel the tradition which was forced upon the Negro in the theatre, that is, the minstrel technique that makes the ‘white folks’ laugh. Her characters eat and laugh and cry and work and kill; they swing like a pendulum eternally in that safe and narrow orbit in which America likes to see the Negro live: between laughter and tears … The sensory sweep of her novel carries no theme, no message, no thought. In the main, her novel is not addressed to the Negro, but to a white audience whose chauvinistic tastes she knows how to satisfy.