| Zora Neale Hurston |
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1891?-1960, folklorist, anthropologist, and novelist.
Outspoken, spirited, and gifted, Hurston was the most prolific
African-American woman writer of the 1930s. She was born and raised in
all-black Eatonville, Florida, the major shaping influence of her
affirmative vision of African-American rural folk culture. Inspired as a
child by the advice of her dying mother to "jump at de sun" and to be her
mother's voice, she achieved success under the guidance of Franz Boas as a
prize-winning folklorist, anthropologist, and writer. Industry,
intelligence, ingenuity, and white patrons facilitated her education as a
writer and anthropologist at Morgan Academy, Howard University, Barnard
College, and Columbia University, where she studied with Boas.
When she arrived in New York in 1925, Hurston's genius for storytelling, drama, and flamboyance helped her make friends quickly. In addition to Boas, the most important were Fannie Hurst, who employed her as a secretary and confidant, Carl Van Vechten, and Charlotte Mason, the patron of several black artists. Much of Hurston's folklore research in the South, the Bahamas, Haiti, and Jamaica was sponsored by these individuals; she also received a Guggenheim Fellowship in 1936. Hurston drew on the tension between her folk and formal education for the ethnic material and double-voiced manner of short stories and articles that won her acclaim in the 1920s and 1930s. But many black contemporaries of the Harlem Renaissance and depression eras criticized her willingness to play the minstrel role for whites, and some criticized her books for being pastoral and apolitical. Her most controversial political act was to express opposition to the 1954 Supreme Court school desegregation decision, which she resented for portraying southern blacks as inferior to whites. She died in penniless obscurity. Her literary revival began a decade after her death with poet and novelist Alice Walker's essay "Looking for Zora" (1971), which movingly describes her discovery of Hurston as a literary ancestor. Following the publication in 1977 of Robert Hemenway's Hurston biography, critics reclaimed from literary obscurity her two books of folklore (Mules and Men, 1935, and Tell My Horse, 1938), three romances (Jonah's Gourd Vine, 1934, Their Eyes Were Watching God, 1937, and Moses, Man of the Mountain, 1939), and autobiography (Dust Tracks on a Road, 1942). More important, literary critics have reassessed Hurston's significance in the canons of European-American, African-American, and women's literatures. Mules and Men and Tell My Horse-the first based on materials collected in Florida and Louisiana, the second on materials gathered in Jamaica and Haiti-are distinctive for the lively, unorthodox manner in which Hurston integrates and dramatizes herself as ethnographer with her black informants, the tales they tell, and the folk culture they live. Both books are important resources for the bicultural belief systems and ritual practices of peoples of African descent in the Americas. Mules and Men provides useful descriptions of hoodoo, and Tell My Horse provides detailed accounts of voodoo. Hurston's most commercially successful book was Dust Tracks on a Road, though critics agree that its dazzling black idiom and formal rhetoric conceal more than they reveal about the details of her life. Her most critically acclaimed book is Their Eyes Were Watching God. Janie Crawford's quest is the prototypical black love story and account of a woman's search for identity. Its mixture of formal rhetoric and black idiom is poetic without being folksy; its retrospective narrative structure is loose without being disjointed; its dynamic characters are stylized without being exotic; and its romantic quest for personal wholeness and female autonomy is centered on egalitarianism without exploitation in living and loving. source: http://www.historychannel.com/perl/print_book.pl?ID=35238 |