Reprint, New York: HarperPerennial, Compiled by Carla Kaplan. New York: Doubleday, Lyons, Mary E. Sorrow's Kitchen. New York: Scribner's, Zora Neale Hurston, Writer and Storyteller. Hillside, NJ: Enslow, Witcover, Paul. Zora Neale Hurston.
New York: Chelsea House, Toggle navigation. Early career Hurston had a variety of jobs in addition to the writing recognition that brought her fame. She would sometimes write in her bedroom while the party went on in the living room.
When her autobiography, Dust Tracks on a Road , was published in , Hurston finally received the well-earned acclaim that had long eluded her. She went on to publish another novel, Seraph on the Suwanee , in Still, Hurston never received the financial rewards she deserved. So when she died on Jan. That summer, a young writer named Alice Walker traveled to Fort Pierce to place a marker on the grave of the author who had so inspired her own work.
Walker found the Garden of Heavenly Rest, a segregated cemetery at the dead end of North 17th Street, abandoned and overgrown with yellow-flowered weeds. Writing to W. Over a career that spanned more than 30 years, she published four novels, two books of folklore, an autobiography, numerous short stories, and several essays, articles and plays. She could look to town hall and see black men, including her father, John Hurston, formulating the laws that governed Eatonville.
She could look to the porch of the village store and see black men and women passing worlds through their mouths in the form of colorful, engaging stories. January 7, Born in Notasulga, Alabama, the fifth of eight children, to John Hurston, a carpenter and Baptist preacher, and Lucy Potts Hurston, a former schoolteacher.
September - June Attends Morgan Academy in Baltimore, completing the high school requirements. She labored over several books, none considered publishable. Her radical independence was more than ever reflected in her politics: fervently anti-Communist, officially Republican, resisting anything that smacked of special pleading.
When Brown v. Board of Education was decided, in , she was furious—and wrote furiously—over the implication that blacks could learn only when seated next to whites, or that anyone white should be forced to sit beside anyone black. Her reputation as a traitor to her people overshadowed and outlasted her reasoning, her works, and her life. Hurston died in January, , in the Saint Lucie County welfare home, in Fort Pierce, Florida, four days before the first sit-in took place, at a Woolworth lunch counter in Greensboro, North Carolina.
She was buried in an unmarked grave in a segregated cemetery in Fort Pierce. All her books were out of print. These books bring Hurston a long way from the smudged photocopies that used to circulate, like samizdat, at academic conventions, and usher her into the national literary canon in highly respectable hardback.
She is the fourth African-American to be published in this august series, and the fifth woman, and the first writer who happens to be both. Harold Bloom has written of Hurston as continuing in the line of the Wife of Bath and Falstaff and Whitman, as a figure of outrageous vitality, fulfilling the Nietzschean charge that we try to live as though it were always morning.
Outside of fiction, this kind of strength is mainly a matter of determination. For many who have embodied it in literature—Nietzsche, Whitman, Lawrence, Hurston—it is a passionate dream of health dreamed while the simply healthy are sound asleep which stirs a rare insistence and bravado. How can any deny themselves the pleasure of my company! The near-Darwinian purpose was to get so strong that, no matter what you heard about whomever you loved, you would not let on that you cared to do anything but laugh.
But Zora Neale Hurston was the champ. It is important not to blink at what she had to face and how it made her feel. Envy, fury, confusion, desire to escape: there is no wonder in it. We know too well the world she came from. It is the world she rebuilt out of words and the extraordinary song of the words themselves—about love and picking beans and fighting through hurricanes—that have given us something entirely new. And who is to say that this is not a political achievement?
These sitters had been tongueless, earless, eyeless conveniences all day long. Mules and other brutes had occupied their skins. But now, the sun and the bossman were gone, so the skins felt powerful and human.
They became lords of sounds and lesser things. They passed notions through their mouths. They sat in judgment.
The powerless become lords of sounds, the dispossessed rule all creation with their tongues. Language is not a small victory. And in a single book one woman managed to suggest what another such heroic tradition, rising out of American slavery, might have been—a literature as profound and original as the spirituals. There is the sense of a long, ghostly procession behind Hurston: what might have existed if only more of the words and stories had been written down decades earlier, if only Phillis Wheatley had not tried to write like Alexander Pope, if only literate slaves and their generations of children had not felt pressed to prove their claim to the sworn civilities.
She had to try to make up for all of this, and more. If out of broken bits of talk and memory she pieced together something that may once have existed, out of will and desire she added what never was.
Hurston created a myth that has been gratefully mistaken for history, and in which she herself plays a mythic role—a myth about a time and place fair enough, funny enough, unbitter enough, glad enough to have produced a woman black and truly free. By John C. Hemenway, Robert. Hurston, Zora Neale. Novels and Stories. Cheryl Wall. New York: Library of America, Dust Tracks on a Road. New York: Harper Collins, Reissue How to Cite this page.
Additional Resources. Zora Neale Hurston: Digital Archive. Related Biographies. Abrams is now one of the most prominent African American female politicians in the United States. Abigail Adams was an early advocate for women's rights. A progressive social reformer and activist, Jane Addams was on the frontline of the settlement house movement and was the first American woman to win a Nobel Peace Prize. Famed author Louisa May Alcott created colorful relatable characters in 19th century novels.
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