Zora Neale Hurston’s is considered one of the well-known writers of the twentieth-century African-American literature. She was born on January 7, 1891 in the small town of Notasulga, Alabama. Her father was as carpenter, a sharecropper, and a Baptist preacher. Her mother, Lucy, was a former schoolteacher. Zora was the fifth of eight children in the household of the Hurston’s. Within a year of her birth, the family moved to Eatonville, Florida. Eatonville was the first integrated black town in the United States. Zora’s mother died in 1904 and Zora was devastated by her death. Her father removed her from school later that same year and sent her to care for her brother’s children. She was a rowdy and impatient teenager and was ready to leave the assignment of her brother’s household. At the age of sixteen she became a member of a traveling theater and she later began domestic work in a white household. The woman that she worked for bought her, her first book and arranged for Zora to attend high school at Morgan Academy in Baltimore. Zora graduated in June 1918. The following summer, Zora worked as a waitress and a manicurist before she enrolled in Howard Prep School. Later she attended Howard University. She spent almost four years at Howard but she only graduated with a two-tear Associate degree. The early 1920s mark the beginning of Zora Neale Hurston’s career as an author because she spent most of her time at Howard writing. She started with a college publication and then she entered into writing contests in newspapers and magazines. The Harlem Renaissance was building steam in 1925 and Hurston headed to New York City. In New York, she enrolled in Barnard College to study anthropology under Franz Boas, an important founder of the discipline of anthropology. While in New York, Hurston married her boyfriend Herbert Sheen from Howard University but their marriage was brief. Once Zora graduated from Barnard, she returned to her hometown of Eatonville to gather materials for her maturing writing career. She published numerous works in the 1920s and thus gained financial sponsorship from wealthy New York sponsors. Hurston’s literary career peaked in the 1930s and early 1940s. Zora completed graduate work at Columbia, published four novels, and an autobiography. One of her novels is ‘Their Eyes Were Watching God’ and she will be reading this novel later in this class. She was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship. She journeyed to the Caribbean where she became interested by the practice of voodoo. After her visit to the Caribbean, she began to include supernatural elements into her novels and stories. She often felt like she was under attack by members of the Black Arts Movement because her work received increasing approval from the white publishers of New York. Zora labeled these critics as members of the “niggerati” for being close-minded in their criticism of her racial politics. Hurston’s writing career was weakening by the mid-1940s and she was arrested and charged with the molestation of a ten-year-old boy. Even though she was innocent, the damages to her image remained forever. Zora then lapsed into depression as the publishers declined her works one right after another. Hurston returned to Florida around 1950 where she worked cleaning houses. Hurston became a penniless loner after a slew of unsuccessful career changes including those of a newspaper journalist, librarian, and a substitute teacher. In 1959, she suffered a fatal stroke and was buried at an unmarked grave in Fort Pierce, Florida.
Works Cited
Zora Neale Hurston. Web. 01 Mar. 2011. http://www.zoranealehurston.com/.
Zora Neale Hurston. Web. 01 Mar. 2011. http://www.zoranealehurston.com/biography.html.
"Biography of Zora Neale Hurston | List of Works, Study Guides & Essays | GradeSaver." Study Guides & Essay Editing | GradeSaver. Web. 01 Mar. 2011. http://www.gradesaver.com/author/zora-neale-hurston/.
No comments:
Post a Comment