The Literary Life, Death, and Resurrection of Zora Neale Hurston

Hurston eventually moved back to Florida, after which she published an anthology of African American folklore in Florida, Mules and Men. Mules and Men embodied a significant passion of Hurston’s, the anthropological aspect of writing. While Hurston was interested in Black culture on a global scale, traveling to Jamaica and Haiti to study African diasporic religions, her great interest was domestic. 

Throughout her career, Hurston would travel around the South conducting interviews, desperate to get at the heart of Black speech and vernacular. Armed with only her charm and her tape recorder, she was committed to writing about African American communities in their own voice. 

Hurston once wrote of her stylistic choices: “I know I cannot straighten out with a few pen strokes what God and men took centuries to mess up. So I tried to deal with life as we actually live it, not as the sociologists imagine it.”

Not everyone agreed with this approach, however, and the pushback would only escalate after the 1937 publication of Hurston’s seminal novel: Their Eyes Were Watching God. Many African American writers of this period wanted to use their fiction to remedy the stereotypes of Black people as uneducated or unintelligent and bristled against Hurston’s more folksy depictions. Where Hurston saw her commitment to African American Vernacular English as a way to celebrate and affirm Black life, many of her peers saw it as upholding prejudicial views of Black people and pandering to white audiences. Ralph Ellison, author of Invisible Man (1952), and Richard Wright, author of Native Son (1940) were particularly vocal against Hurston. Wright even called her writing in Their Eyes Were Watching God “the minstrel technique” referencing Minstrel Shows that had white actors play Black characters as grotesquely exaggerated stereotypes. 

The backlash grew so fierce that Their Eyes Were Watching God slowly went out of print and Hurston fell out of the public eye. Privately, she was devastated. In her eyes, the community of Black writers that she loved and had helped pave the way for, was turning on her. By scorning her writing they rejected the more rural, folkloric depictions of Black life that were not only so much of what she wrote, but so much of who she was. 

Zora Neale Hurston died penniless and in complete obscurity in 1960, at the age of 69. She was buried in an unmarked grave. But her story was not quite over, not yet. 

After Hurston’s literary death and physical death, her complete literary extinction almost occurred. In the wake of her passing all her belongings, including hundreds of papers of her writing were ordered to be burned. Thankfully, a deputy police officer on-site named Patrick DuVal had known Hurston in her nursing home and thought her writing might be important. He quickly doused the already lit flames, and in doing so, gave Hurston’s legacy a second chance that a few moments later, would have been wholly extinguished. 

It would take another 15 years for Hurston’s literary legacy to be resurrected. In 1973, Alice Walker, the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of The Color Purple, published a short non-fiction essay titled “In Search of Zora Neale Hurston.” The piece chronicled Walker’s journey to find Hurston’s unmarked grave, and what Hurston’s work meant to her as a writer. The piece completely revived interest in Hurston’s work and led to many scholars reconsidering the previously held notions about its literary value.

Today, Hurston’s rigorous and detailed accounts of southern Black life have become not only a brilliant piece of fiction for future generations to enjoy and cherish, but a time capsule, an anthropological study, and a testament to the enduring power of her resilient spirit. 

The daughter of both enslaved individuals and pillars of a proud Black community, Hurston understood where so many did not that the most powerful stories are the true ones. No matter their complexity, no matter the pushback, the best story we can ever tell is the one that is true. 

For more information check out:

‍“About Zora Neale Hurston,” The Official Website of Zora Neale Hurston.

“In the Key of The Blues: Zora Neale Hurston’s Writing,” Signature Theatre, May 8, 2019.

Norwood, Arlisha, R. “Zora Neale Hurston,” National Women’s History Museum, 2017.

Walters, Tim. “Black History Month: Zora Neale Hurston died alone, her belongings almost burned. Now there is a festival in her name.” The Palm Beach Post, February 25, 2020.

“Zora Neale Hurston,” Biography, Apr 23, 2021.

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