ZORA NEALE HURSTON

A concise exploration of the life and work of the acclaimed writer, anthropologist, and folklorist.

In the latest in the Critical Lives series, Hopson, a professor of English and African American studies, argues that Zora Neale Hurston (1891-1960) used her “firm foundation of self-knowledge and self-worth” to “build herself up from the frontier that was Eatonville, Florida, where she grew up, and from out of the squalor in which she lived after her mother died in 1904.” The author’s upbringing in all Black Eatonville fostered the bright girl’s curiosity and daydreaming. When she was 13, her father sent her to a Christian school in Jacksonville, after which she continued her education at Howard. At 37, with financial help from friends, Hurston graduated from Barnard College, its first Black student. She was mentored in anthropology by Franz Boas, who sent her to Eatonville to research Black culture; then she moved to New York City and “quickly transitioned…to an award-winning Black woman intellectual” amid the Harlem Renaissance. Her 1926 play, Color Struck, a “pioneering literary work,” won second place in drama from Opportunity: A Journal of Negro Life. In 1928, she “underwent a voodoo conversion” in New Orleans, later writing her “manifesto of selfhood and identity,” “How It Feels To Be Colored Me.” In 1931, Hurston wrote the posthumously published Barracoon, which deals with the slave trade, and two years later, her first novel, Jonah’s Gourd Vine. In 1935, she published her important folklore collection, Mules and Men, with Boas’ introduction, and her highly influential novel Their Eyes Were Watching God came out the next year. After moving to California, she wrote a memoir, Dust Tracks on a Road, which Hopson describes as “an invaluable work of self-fashioning and self-promotion.” Though well researched, the narrative suffers from patches of dry, choppy prose.

A serviceable introduction for general readers.