Zora Neale Hurston

ZORA NEALE HURSTON:

By: Wilesha Graham

Literature At Its Best

ZORA NEALE HURSTON’S ACCOMPLISHMENTS: A novelist, folklorist, and anthropologist, Zora Neale Hurston was the prototypical authority on black culture from the Harlem Renaissance. In this artistic movement of the 1920s black artists moved from traditional dialectical works and imitation of white writers to explore their own culture and affirm pride in their race. Zora Neale Hurston pursued this objective by combining literature with anthropology. She first gained attention with her short stories such as "John Redding Goes to Sea" and "Spunk" which appeared in black literary magazines.

Robert Hemenway wrote, Hurston "helped to remind the Renaissance especially its more bourgeois members of the richness in the racial heritage”.

After several years of anthropological research financed through grants and fellowships, Zora Neale Hurston's first novel Jonah's Gourd Vine was published in 1934 to critical success. In 1935, her book Mules and Men, which investigated voodoo practices in black communities in Florida and New Orleans, also brought her kudos.

"There is no book more

important to me than this

one." - Alice Walker

"THEIR EYES WERE

WATCHING GOD belongs in

the same category with [the

works of] William Faulkner,

F. Scott Fitzgerald, and

Ernest Hemingway, that of

enduring American

literature."

- Saturday Review

First published in 1942 at the height of her popularity, Dust Tracks on a Road is Zora Neale Hurston’s candid, funny, bold, and poignant autobiography, an imaginative and exuberant account of her rise from childhood poverty in the rural South to a prominent place among the leading artists and intellectuals of the Harlem Renaissance.

“I do not belong to that sobbing school of Negrohood who hold that nature somehow has given them a lowdown dirty deal”. – Zora Neale Hurston

REFERENCES"Gale - Free Resources - Black History - Biographies - Zora Neale Hurston." Gale - Home. Web. 08 May 2011. <http://www.gale.cengage.com/free_resources/bhm/bio/hurston_z.htm>.The Official Zora Neale Hurston Website." Zora Neale Hurston. Web. 08 May 2011. <http://www.zoranealehurston.com/index.html>.