Zora Neale Hurston (January 7, 1891 – January 28, 1960) was an American novelist, short story writer, folklorist, and anthropologist. Of Hurston’s four novels and more than 50 published short stories, plays, and essays, she is best known for her 1937 novel Their Eyes Were Watching God.

Hurston was the fifth of eight 𝘤𝘩𝘪𝘭𝘥ren of John Hurston and Lucy Ann Hurston (née Potts). Her father was a Baptist preacher, tenant farmer, and carpenter, and her mother was a school teacher. She was 𝐛𝐨𝐫𝐧 in Notasulga, Alabama, on January 7, 1891, where her father grew up and her grandfather was the preacher of a Baptist church.

When she was three, her family moved to Eatonville, Florida. Hurston later used Eatonville as a backdrop in her stories. It was a place where African Americans could live as they desired, independent of white society. In 1901, some northern schoolteachers visited Eatonville and gave Hurston a number of books that opened her mind to literature; she described it as a kind of “𝐛𝐢𝐫𝐭𝐡”. Hurston spent the remainder of her 𝘤𝘩𝘪𝘭𝘥hood in Eatonville, and describes the experience of growing up there in her 1928 essay, “How It Feels to Be Colored Me”.

In 1918, Hurston began studies at Howard University, where she became one of the earliest initiates of Zeta Phi Beta Sorority and co-founded The Hilltop, the university’s student newspaper. While there, she took courses in Spanish, English, Greek and public speaking and earned an associate degree in 1920. In 1921, she wrote a short story, John Redding Goes to Sea, which qualified her to become a member of Alaine Locke’s literary club, The Stylus. Hurston left Howard in 1924 and in 1925 was offered a scholarship by Barnard trustee Annie Nathan Meyer to Barnard College, Columbia University, where she was the college’s sole black student. Hurston received her B.A. in anthropology in 1928, when she was 37. In 1927, Hurston married Herbert Sheen, a jazz musician and former classmate at Howard who later became a physician. Their marriage ended in 1931. In 1939, while Hurston was working for the WPA, she married Albert Price, who was 25 years younger than she; this marriage ended after only seven months.

During the 1930s, Hurston was a resident of Westfield, New Jersey, where Langston Hughes was among her neighbors. In 1934 she established a school of dramatic arts “based on pure Negro expression” at Bethune-Cookman University.

When Hurston arrived in New York City in 1925, the Harlem Renaissance was at its peak, and she soon became one of the writers at its center. Shortly before she entered Barnard, Hurston’s short story “Spunk” was selected for The New Negro, a landmark anthology of fiction, poetry, and essays focusing on African and African-American art and literature. In 1926, a group of young black writers including Hurston, Langston Hughes, and Wallace Thurman, calling themselves the Niggerati, produced a literary magazine called Fire!! that featured many of the young artists and writers of the Harlem Renaissance. In 1930, she collaborated with Langston Hughes on Mule Bone: A Comedy of Negro Life in Three Acts, a play that they never staged. It was published posthumously in 1991.Hurston’s first three novels were published in the 1930s: Jonah’s Gourd Vine (1934); Their Eyes Were Watching God (1937), written during her fieldwork in Haiti and considered her masterwork; and Moses, Man of the Mountain (1939).

Hurston’s work slid into obscurity for decades, for a number of cultural and political reasons.

Many readers objected to the representation of African-American dialect in Hurston’s novels, given the racially charged history of dialect fiction in American literature. Her stylistic choices in terms of dialogue were influenced by her academic experiences. Thinking like a folklorist, Hurston strove to represent speech patterns of the period which she documented through ethnographic research.

More recently, many critics have praised Hurston’s s𝓀𝒾𝓁𝓁ful use of idiomatic speech.

Author Alice Walker sought Hurston’s grave in 1973 and planted a grave marker calling her “A Genius of the South.” Walker then published “In Search of Zora Neale Hurston” in the March 1975 issue of Ms. magazine, reviving interest in Hurston’s work. The renewal of attention to Hurston was related also to the rise of new African-American authors such as Maya Angelou, Toni Morrison, and Walker, whose works are centered on African-American experiences and include, but do not necessarily focus upon, racial struggle.

Zora Neale Hurston’s hometown of Eatonville, Florida, celebrates her life in an annual festival and is home to the Zora Neale Hurston Museum of Fine Arts, named in her honor. Her life and legacy are celebrated every year here at the Zora Neale Hurston Festival of the Arts and Humanities

She was inducted as a member of the inaugural class of the New York Writers Hall of Fame in 2010.

She was one of twelve inaugural inductees to the Alabama Writers Hall of Fame on June 8, 2015.