Women of the Hall

Year Honored: 1994
Birth: 1891 - Death: 1960
Born In: Alabama, United States of America
Died In: Florida, United States of America
Achievements: Arts
Educated In: Maryland, New York, District of Columbia
Schools Attended: Morgan Academy, Howard Prep School, Howard University, Barnard College, Columbia University
Worked In: New York, District of Columbia, Florida, Jamaica, Haiti, North Carolina, South Carolina, British Honduras (Belize)

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Zora Neale Hurston

Novelist, anthropologist, folklorist - Zora Neale Hurston's work in a range of fields contributed greatly to the preservation of African-American folk traditions, as well as to American literature. Born in Eatonville, Florida, the first incorporated all-Black city, Hurston studied anthropology at Barnard College in New York with famed scholar Franz Boas (she was the first African-American woman to graduate from the college), and did graduate work at Columbia University. She conducted field work in African-American folklore all over the South. She began publishing novels; Their Eyes Were Watching God is often considered her finest novel. She taught for some years at what is now North Carolina Central University, and won a Guggenheim fellowship to pursue her writing. Her 1942 autobiography, Dust Tracks on a Road, was one of her last major works; in it, she wrote, "I want a busy life, a just mind, and a timely death." Hurston's work enouraged the study of folklore and anthropology nationwide. Her intense focus on the lives of African-American women has been of equal or greater impact.

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Additional Sources:
Hemenway, Robert E. Zora Neale Hurston: a literary biography. Urbana, Illinois: University of Illinois Press, 1980, c1977. NOTES: Includes bibliographical references and index.

Henderson, Jane M. Dimensions of Marginality: the transindividual consciousness and the erotic in the aesthetics of Audre Lorde, Alice Walker and Zora Neale Hurston. NOTES: Student thesis submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for Honors in Religious Studies at Hobart and William Smith Colleges. Geneva, New York. Bibliography: p. 63-64.

Porter, A.P. Jump at De Sun: The Story of Zora Neale Hurston First Avenue Editions, reprint 1992.

Edited by: Harold Bloom. Zora Neale Hurston New York: Chelsea House Pub., 1986.

Compiled by Carla Kaplan. Zora Neale Hurston: A Life in Letters. New York: Doubleday, 2001.

Edited by: Alice Walker. I love myself when I am laughing ..and then again when I am looking mean and impressive: a Zora Neale Hurston reader. Old Westbury, New York: Feminist Press, 1979. NOTES: Includes bibliographical references.

Their Eyes Were Watching God. Philadelphia; London: J.B. Lippincott Company, 1937.

With Langston Hughes. Mule Bone. New York, New York: HarperPerennial, 1991. NOTES: Written 1931, and remained unpublished until 1991.

Jonah's Gourd Vine. Philadelphia: J.B. Lippincott Company, 1934.

Mules and Men Philadephia; London: J.B. Lippincott Company, 1935.

Dust Tracks on a Road: An Autobiography. Philadelphia: J.B. Lippincott Company, 1942.

Seraph on the Suwanee. New York: Scribner's, 1948.

Papers 1932-1960, 3ft. University of Florida, Libraries. Gainesville, Florida.