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The Life of Zora Neale Hurston Essay (Biography)
Introduction
Zora Neale Hurston was a proclaimed novelist, folklorist, and anthropologist whose artistic contribution in the Harlem renaissance was outstandingly evident. She was the fifth-born child to John Hurston, a Baptist preacher and a carpenter, and Lucy Potts Hurston, a schoolteacher. Zora Neale Hurston was born in Notasulga, Alabama on January 7,
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The family relocated to “Eatonville, Florida, which was the first all-Black town to be incorporated in the United States, while she was still a toddler” (Ellis, , p). They were eight children in the family. As Hurston later glorifies in her literary works, the town was the first to offer African Americans the chance to live freely and independent of the Whites, as they desired.
This assertion is depicted in most of her fictional works, as it is the setting for most of her stories. Her father later on became the mayor of the town. Despite the fact that the actual birth year of Zora Neale Hurston was in , became the year of her birth throughout her life.
There was a significant happening in her life that year, which is argued as the reason behind her decision. In , some schoolteachers from the north visited her hometown, and she was lucky to get some books that sparked her interest in literature (Baym, , p).
In-Depth Look into the Life of Zora Neale Hurston
In an essay she wrote in titled &#;How It Feels to Be Colored Me&#;, Hurston describes her childhood in Eatonville as easy considering that she grew surrounded by the people who supported her, and the discrimination that was taking place elsewhere was not a reality in her hometown.
This, however, changed in when her mother died and the father remarried soon afterwards to a young lady named Matte Moge (Ellis, , p). There were rumors that Zora Neale’s father Mr. Hurston had an affair with Moge even before the wife died.
Zora had
From Orality to Literacy: Hurston’s Use of Literature to Investigate the Possibilities of Writing
1Zora Neale Hurston’s work is generally celebrated for its uses of regionalism, dialect, and folklore which have been widely discussed over the past decades. Surprisingly, however, relatively little, if any, critical attention has been paid to the manifold lists that are spread across her work and letters and especially to the “glossaries” that accompany three of her prose texts: Hurston’s first novel Jonah’s Gourd Vine (), her anthropological study Mules and Men (), and her short story “Story in Harlem Slang” (). Typically, critics regard Hurston’s glossaries as more or less insignificant textual add-ons or “paratexts,” a term coined by Gérard Genette (), and consequently refer to them only briefly, if they mention them at all, in their discussions of Hurston’s œuvre. A case in point is the biographer and literary critic Robert Hemenway who, in his well-known and often-cited study Zora Neale Hurston: A Literary Biography (), neglects to mention that Mules and Men and Jonah’s Gourd Vine also have a glossary appended. He notes only that Hurston’s “‘Story in Harlem Slang’ was less fiction than a linguistic study; a glossary of Harlem expressions was attached” (), before he sums up the plot of the short story.1
2Other critics argue that Hurston’s glossaries point to her role as a mediator or translator between cultures. In the introduction of Jump at the Sun: Zora Neale Hurston’s Cosmic Comedy (), John Lowe, for instance, likens Hurston to Dante’s Virgil, because like him she “take[s] her readers on a tour of what they think are the ‘lower depths’ and scramble[s] their notions of what Heaven and Hell, God and Devil are” (33). In line with the simile, he claims that “she often casts herself as explicator of the places she shows” (33), which
becomes obvious . . . in her repeated appendage of ‘glossaries’ to various texts, a natural outgrowth of adding
Zora Neale Hurston
American author, anthropologist, filmmaker (–)
Zora Neale Hurston (January 7, – January 28, ) was an American writer, anthropologist, folklorist, and documentary filmmaker. She portrayed racial struggles in the earlyth-century American South and published research on Hoodoo and Caribbean Vodou. The most popular of her four novels is Their Eyes Were Watching God, published in She also wrote more than 50 short stories, plays, an autobiography, ethnographies, and many essays.
Hurston was born in Notasulga, Alabama, and moved with her family to Eatonville, Florida in She later used Eatonville as the setting for many of her stories. In her early career, Hurston conducted anthropological and ethnographic research as a scholar at Barnard College and Columbia University. She had an interest in African-American and Caribbean folklore, and how these contributed to the community's identity.
She also wrote about contemporary issues in the black community and became a central figure of the Harlem Renaissance. Her short satires, drawing from the African-American experience and racial division, were published in anthologies such as The New Negro and Fire!! After moving back to Florida, Hurston wrote and published her literary anthology on African-American folklore in North Florida, Mules and Men (), and her first three novels: Jonah's Gourd Vine (); Their Eyes Were Watching God (); and Moses, Man of the Mountain (). Also published during this time was Tell My Horse: Voodoo and Life in Haiti and Jamaica (), documenting her research on rituals in Jamaica and Haiti.
Hurston's works concerned both the African-American experience and her struggles as an African-American woman. Her novels went relatively unrecognized by the literary world for decades. In , fifteen years after Hurston's death, interest in her work was revived after
Zora neale hurston died .