Title: Zora Neale Hurston Biography - eNotes.com
Headings: Zora Neale Hurston Biography
Zora Neale Hurston Biography
Facts and Trivia
Biography
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Content: Zora Neale Hurston Biography - eNotes.com
Zora Neale Hurston Biography
L ike so many writers, Zora Neale Hurston was ahead of her time and not fully appreciated by her contemporaries, but she is now considered one of the most important African American women of the twentieth century. Her most famous work is the 1937 novel Their Eyes Were Watching God. One of its key (but controversial) features was the use of dialogue in an African American dialect. Though some critics at the time, including many from the African American community, viewed the novel’s dialogue as caricatured, it would become a celebrated trademark of Hurston’s writing. Her uncompromising novels later influenced seminal African American writers such as Toni Morrison, Maya Angelou, and Alice Walker. Facts and Trivia
Eatonville, Florida, where Hurston grew up, was an all-black incorporated town, which her father was elected mayor of in 1897. John Hurston and Lucy Ann Potts, Hurston's parents, were both former slaves. After her mother's death, Hurston's father and stepmother sent her to boarding school in Jacksonville, Florida, but eventually stopped paying the tuition, and Hurston was expelled. Although highly regarded as a literary figure, Hurston originally studied anthropology, receiving a bachelor’s degree in that field from Barnard College. Hurston was one of many artists who contributed to a period known as the Harlem Renaissance, a cultural flourishing of literature, art, and music by and about African Americans.