( The most prolific African-American woman author from 19...)
The most prolific African-American woman author from 1920 to 1950, Hurston was praised for her writing and condemned for her independence, arrogance, and audaciousness. This unique anthology, with fourteen superb examples of her fiction, journalism, folklore, and autobiography, rightfully establishes her as the intellectual and spiritual leader of the next generation of black writers. The original commentary by Alice Walker and Mary Helen Washington, two African-American writers in the forefront of the Hurston revival, provide illuminating insights into Hurston—the writer, and the person—as well as into American social and cultural history.
https://www.amazon.com/Myself-Laughing-Again-Looking-Impressive/dp/0912670665?SubscriptionId=AKIAJRRWTH346WSPOAFQ&tag=prabook-20&linkCode=sp1&camp=2025&creative=165953&creativeASIN=0912670665
( Based on acclaimed author Zora Neale Hurston's persona...)
Based on acclaimed author Zora Neale Hurston's personal experiences in Haiti and Jamaica—where she participated as an initiate rather than just an observer during her visits in the 1930s—Tell My Horse is a fascinating firsthand account of the mysteries of Voodoo. An invaluable resource and remarkable guide to Voodoo practices, rituals, and beliefs, it is a travelogue into a dark, mystical world that offers a vividly authentic picture of ceremonies, customs, and superstitions.
https://www.amazon.com/Tell-My-Horse-Voodoo-Jamaica/dp/0061695130?SubscriptionId=AKIAJRRWTH346WSPOAFQ&tag=prabook-20&linkCode=sp1&camp=2025&creative=165953&creativeASIN=0061695130
https://www.amazon.com/Poker-Zora-Neale-Hurston-ebook/dp/B004TILB02?SubscriptionId=AKIAJRRWTH346WSPOAFQ&tag=prabook-20&linkCode=sp1&camp=2025&creative=165953&creativeASIN=B004TILB02
( From Zora Neale Hurston, one of the most important Afri...)
From Zora Neale Hurston, one of the most important African American writers of the twentieth century, comes her riveting autobiography—now available in a limited Olive Edition. First published in 1942 at the height of her popularity, Dust Tracks on a Road is Zora Neale Hurston’s candid, funny, bold, and poignant autobiography—an imaginative and exuberant account of her childhood in the rural South and her rise to a prominent place among the leading artists and intellectuals of the Harlem Renaissance. As compelling as her acclaimed fiction, Hurston’s very personal literary self-portrait offers a revealing, often audacious glimpse into the life—public and private—of an extraordinary artist, anthropologist, chronicler, and champion of the Black experience in America. Full of the wit and wisdom of a proud, spirited woman who started off low and climbed high, Dust Tracks on a Road is a rare treasure from one of literature’s most cherished voices. “Warm, witty, imaginative. . . . This is a rich and winning book.”—The New Yorker
https://www.amazon.com/Dust-Tracks-Road-Neale-Hurston/dp/0062695797?SubscriptionId=AKIAJRRWTH346WSPOAFQ&tag=prabook-20&linkCode=sp1&camp=2025&creative=165953&creativeASIN=0062695797
( New York Times Bestseller • Amazon's Best History Book ...)
New York Times Bestseller • Amazon's Best History Book of the Year 201 • TIME Magazine’s Best Nonfiction Book of 2018 • New York Public Library’s Best Book of 2018 • NPR’s Book Concierge Best Book of 2018 • Economist Book of the Year • SELF.com’s Best Books of 2018 • Audible’s Best of the Year • BookRiot’s Best Audio Books of 2018 • The Atlantic’s Books Briefing: History, Reconsidered • Atlanta Journal Constitution, Best Southern Books 2018 • The Christian Science Monitor’s Best Books 2018 • Barnes & Noble’s Best Books of the Year “A profound impact on Hurston’s literary legacy.”—New York Times “One of the greatest writers of our time.”—Toni Morrison “Zora Neale Hurston’s genius has once again produced a Maestrapiece.”—Alice Walker A major literary event: a newly published work from the author of the American classic Their Eyes Were Watching God, with a foreword from Pulitzer Prize-winning author Alice Walker, brilliantly illuminates the horror and injustices of slavery as it tells the true story of one of the last-known survivors of the Atlantic slave trade—abducted from Africa on the last "Black Cargo" ship to arrive in the United States. In 1927, Zora Neale Hurston went to Plateau, Alabama, just outside Mobile, to interview eighty-six-year-old Cudjo Lewis. Of the millions of men, women, and children transported from Africa to America as slaves, Cudjo was then the only person alive to tell the story of this integral part of the nation’s history. Hurston was there to record Cudjo’s firsthand account of the raid that led to his capture and bondage fifty years after the Atlantic slave trade was outlawed in the United States. In 1931, Hurston returned to Plateau, the African-centric community three miles from Mobile founded by Cudjo and other former slaves from his ship. Spending more than three months there, she talked in depth with Cudjo about the details of his life. During those weeks, the young writer and the elderly formerly enslaved man ate peaches and watermelon that grew in the backyard and talked about Cudjo’s past—memories from his childhood in Africa, the horrors of being captured and held in a barracoon for selection by American slavers, the harrowing experience of the Middle Passage packed with more than 100 other souls aboard the Clotilda, and the years he spent in slavery until the end of the Civil War. Based on those interviews, featuring Cudjo’s unique vernacular, and written from Hurston’s perspective with the compassion and singular style that have made her one of the preeminent American authors of the twentieth-century, Barracoon masterfully illustrates the tragedy of slavery and of one life forever defined by it. Offering insight into the pernicious legacy that continues to haunt us all, black and white, this poignant and powerful work is an invaluable contribution to our shared history and culture.
https://www.amazon.com/Barracoon-Story-Last-Black-Cargo/dp/0062748203?SubscriptionId=AKIAJRRWTH346WSPOAFQ&tag=prabook-20&linkCode=sp1&camp=2025&creative=165953&creativeASIN=0062748203
( Mules and Men is a treasury of black America's folklore...)
Mules and Men is a treasury of black America's folklore as collected by a famous storyteller and anthropologist who grew up hearing the songs and sermons, sayings and tall tales that have formed an oral history of the South since the time of slavery. Returning to her hometown of Eatonville, Florida, to gather material, Zora Neale Hurston recalls "a hilarious night with a pinch of everything social mixed with the storytelling." Set intimately within the social context of black life, the stories, "big old lies," songs, Vodou customs, and superstitions recorded in these pages capture the imagination and bring back to life the humor and wisdom that is the unique heritage of African Americans.
https://www.amazon.com/Mules-Harper-Perennial-Modern-Classics/dp/0061350176?SubscriptionId=AKIAJRRWTH346WSPOAFQ&tag=prabook-20&linkCode=sp1&camp=2025&creative=165953&creativeASIN=0061350176
( A PBS Great American Read Top 100 Pick “A deeply soulf...)
A PBS Great American Read Top 100 Pick “A deeply soulful novel that comprehends love and cruelty, and separates the big people from the small of heart, without ever losing sympathy for those unfortunates who don’t know how to live properly.” —Zadie Smith One of the most important and enduring books of the twentieth century, Their Eyes Were Watching God brings to life a Southern love story with the wit and pathos found only in the writing of Zora Neale Hurston. Out of print for almost thirty years—due largely to initial audiences’ rejection of its strong black female protagonist—Hurston’s classic has since its 1978 reissue become perhaps the most widely read and highly acclaimed novel in the canon of African-American literature.
https://www.amazon.com/Their-Eyes-Were-Watching-God/dp/0061120065?SubscriptionId=AKIAJRRWTH346WSPOAFQ&tag=prabook-20&linkCode=sp1&camp=2025&creative=165953&creativeASIN=0061120065
anthropologist folklorist novelist writer
Hurston was born in Notasulga, Alabama, in January 7, 1891. She moved to Eatonville, Florida, with her family in 1894. She was the daughter of John Hurston, a tenant farmer, carpenter, and itinerant Baptist preacher, and of Lucy Ann Potts. Her father, she believed, resented her spirit and independence; her mother encouraged her daughter's ambitions, but died when Hurston was thirteen. Her father remarried.
She enrolled, in September 1917, at Morgan Academy in Baltimore, Md. In September 1918, Hurston entered Howard University in Washington, D. C. , as a student in the Preparatory School. A year later she enrolled in the College Division, where, with the encouragement of faculty member Alain Locke, she began to write and joined the staff of the undergraduate literary magazine, Stylus. Intermittently dropping out of school to work, she was still a sophomore five years after matriculation.
She enrolled in September 1925 at Barnard College in New York City and received the B. A. in 1928.
She was "passed about like a bad penny" until, at the age of fifteen, she became lady's maid to a member of a Gilbert and Sullivan troupe. She toured with the company for eighteen months.
In January 1925, Hurston moved to New York City in hopes of pursuing a writing career. That year her short story "Spunk" won second prize in a contest sponsored by Opportunity, a black journal; the resulting contacts both introduced her to the New York literary world and won her a scholarship to Barnard College in New York City.
In February 1927, while still an undergraduate at Barnard, Hurston received a research fellowship from the Association for the Study of Negro Life and History for a six-month study of Afro-American folklore in the South. This was supplemented, in December of the same year, by a two-year grant, eventually extended until September 1932, from Mrs. Rufus Osgood Mason, a wealthy patron of Afro-American arts. The anthropological research, together with the reimmersion in the atmosphere of her childhood home of Eatonville, led to Hurston's first novel, Jonah's Gourd Vine (1934), and her first collection of folklore, Mules and Men (1935).
Jonah's Gourd Vine was a fictional retelling of the relationship between her father and mother. The interest of the book is due less to plot and characterization than to the rendition of Eatonville (here called Sanford) and the language and mores of its people. Mules and Men, still considered a landmark in the study of black American folklore, had much the same Florida locale, although a concluding section on voodoo was set in New Orleans. It recorded the folkways and songs of the rural South, but kept the personality of Hurston at the fore: how she gained the confidence of her subjects and her own participation in parties, "jook" brawls, and fishing expeditions.
Between 1932 and 1936, Hurston was involved intermittently with teaching and with writing and theatrical productions. An abortive collaboration on a play, Mule Bone, with an old friend, the poet Langston Hughes, led to a bitter quarrel and a permanent break between the two. The play was never produced. A Guggenheim fellowship (1936 - 1938) made it possible for Hurston to study in Jamaica and Haiti. There she acquired material for Tell My Horse (1938), a combined travelogue and study of Caribbean voodoo and magic, and wrote her greatest novel, Their Eyes Were Watching God (1937). In Their Eyes Were Watching God, Hurston returned to Eatonville and southern Florida. With a control of characterization, plot, and philosophy lacking in her earlier fiction, she explored a woman's search for fulfillment, examining and striking down the accepted standards of security, wealth, and convention. The book was as rich in its language as in its characters, and apparently extraneous events (the "pensioning" of an ancient mule, for instance) merged the skills of folklorist and novelist.
Her last two novels, Moses, Man of the Mountain (1939) and Seraph on the Suwanee (1948), were well received, but failed to attract many readers. Moses, Man of the Mountain, which has received increasingly favorable attention in recent years, was a tour de force: Exodus told in the idiom of black Americans. It was also an attempt to deal seriously with the question of racial leadership. Seraph of the Suwanee, although set in Florida, dealt unconvincingly with the lives of whites rather than those of blacks.
In 1942, Hurston published her autobiography, Dust Tracks on a Road, a lively if sometimes unreliable account, perhaps most notable for character sketches of the anthropologist Franz Boas; the novelist Fannie Hurst, for whom she had once worked; and the singer Ethel Waters, as well as for Hurston's proclaimed indifference to American racial conflicts. Always independent, Hurston had earlier quarreled bitterly with her mentor Alain Locke and her friend Langston Hughes, and had existed restlessly under the patronage of Mrs. Mason.
As she aged, Hurston moved from job to job, teaching, writing, even working as a domestic. Early in 1959 she suffered a stroke, and in October of that year she entered the St. Lucie County Welfare Home in Fort Pierce, Fla. , where she died. Funeral expenses were paid by contributions from friends and neighbors. There was not enough money for a headstone, and the exact site of her grave has been lost. Hurston was part of the Harlem Renaissance of the 1920's and 1930's.
Her contribution to Afro-American literature was to incorporate into it an image of the rural black American leading an independent and dignified existence outside the framework of white neighbors and oppressors. Her fiction was drawn not only from childhood memories but also from professional anthropological research, and her published folklore material underscored the sensitivity and complexity of Afro-American social systems. She believed that black Americans possessed a unique and valuable culture, and her work at its best was dedicated to preserving and celebrating that culture.
( Based on acclaimed author Zora Neale Hurston's persona...)
( Mules and Men is a treasury of black America's folklore...)
( New York Times Bestseller • Amazon's Best History Book ...)
( A PBS Great American Read Top 100 Pick “A deeply soulf...)
( From Zora Neale Hurston, one of the most important Afri...)
( The most prolific African-American woman author from 19...)
In the latter part of her life, she developed an increasing political conservatism that drew her apart from the major social and literary developments of her time. She claimed to detest "race books" in general and those of Richard Wright in particular. As the civil rights movement developed in the 1950's, Hurston remained intransigent, opposed to what she called the "tragedy of color" school. From this perspective she criticized school integration, wrote articles suggesting that black votes in the South were sold or misused, and campaigned for right-wing Republican candidates.
On May 19, 1927, Hurston married Herbert Sheen, once her fellow student at Howard. They separated within months and were divorced in 1931. On June 27, 1939, Hurston married Albert Price III, who was fifteen years her junior. This marriage also was short-lived, and Hurston filed for divorce in February 1940.
