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: "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. She exploits that phase of Negro life which is ‘quaint,’ the phase which evokes a piteous smile on the lips of the ‘superior’ race.” As if anticipating her critics’ accusations, Hurston presciently wrote in a 1928 essay, “I am not tragically colored. There is no great sorrow dammed up in my soul, nor lurking behind my eyes … No, I do not weep at the world—I am too busy sharpening my oyster knife.” 9. Their Eyes Were Watching God garnered major acclaim more than 40 years after its publication.