"Zora Neale Hurston" [January 7,1891- January 28,1960]

Was an American folklorist,anthropologist,and author during the time of the Harlem

Renaissance.Of her four novels and more 50 published short stories,plays,and essays,she is best known for her 1937 novel Their Eyes Were Watching God.Zora was the fifth of eight children of John Hurston and Lucy Hurston (nee Potts).Her father was a Baptist preacher,tenant farmer,and carpenter,and her mother was a school teacher.She was born in Notasulga,Alabama,where her father grew up and her grandfather was the preacher of a Baptist church.Her family moved to Eatonville,Florida,the first all-Black town to be incorporated in the United States,when she was three.Zora said she always felt that Eatonville was "home" to her and sometimes claimed it as her birthplace her father later became  mayor of the town,which she would glorify in her stories as a place where African Americans could live as they desired,independent of white society.In 1901,some northern schoolteachers visited Eatonville and gave her a number of her books that opened her mind to literature,and this may be why she sometimes describes her "birth"as taking place in that year.Zora spent the remainder of her childhood in Eatonville,and describes the experience of growing up in Eatonville in her 1928 essay "How It Feels to Be Colored me."In 1904,her mother died and her father remarried,to Matte Moge,almost immediately,considered something of a minor scandal as it was rumored he had relations with Matte before Lucy died.Zora  father and new stepmother sent her away to a boarding school in Jacksonville,Florida,but they eventually stopped paying her tuition and the school expelled her.She later worked as a maid to the  lead singer in traveling Gilbert& Sullivan theatrical company.In 1917,Zora began attending Morgan Academy,the high school division of the historically African American Morgan College in Baltimore,Maryland.It was at this time,and apparently to qualify for a free high-school education  (as well,perhaps to reflect her literary birth),that 26-year-old Zora began claiming 1901 as her date of birth.She graduated from Morgan Academy in 1918.In 1918,she began undergraduate studies at Howard University,where she became one of the earliest initiates of Zeta Phi Beta Sorority and co-founded The Hilltop,the University'student newspaper.While there she took courses in Spanish,English,Greek and public speaking and earned an Associates Degree in 1920.In 1921 she wrote an essay which qualified her to become a member of Alaine Locke's literary club,The Stylus.Zora left Howard in 1924 and 1925 was offered a scholarship to Barnard College where she the college's sole black student.Zora received her  B.A. in anthropology in 1927,when she was 36.While she was at Barnard,she conducted ethnographic research with noted anthropologist Fran Boas of Columbia University.She also worked with Ruth Benedict as well as fellow anthropology student Margaret Mead.After graduating from Barnard,Zora spent two years as a graduate student in anthropology at Columbia University.In 1927,Zora married Herbert Sheen, a jazz musician and former classmate Howard who would later become a physician,but the marriage ended in 1931.In 1939,while Zora was working for the WPA,she married Albert Price, a 23-year-old fellow employee, and 25 years her junior,but this marriage ended after only a few months.When Zora 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 entered Barnard,Zora short story "Spunk"was selected for The Negro,a landmark anthology of fiction,poetry,and essays focusing on African and African American art and literature.In 1926,a ground of young black writers including Zora,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.