Background
Her father was a Baptist preacher, tenant farmer, and carpenter, and her mother was a school teacher.
In 1927, Hurston married Herbert Sheen, a jazz musician and former classmate at Howard who would later become a
physician, but the marriage ended in 1931.
In 1939, while Hurston was working for the WPA, she married Albert Price, a 23-year-old fellow WPA employee, and 25 years her junior, but this marriage ended after only seven months.
She lived in a cottage in Eau Gallie, Florida, twice, once in 1929 and again in 1951.
During the 1930s, Hurston was a resident of Westfield, New Jersey, where Langston Hughes was among her neighbors.
In later life, in addition to continuing her literary career, Hurston served on the faculty of North Carolina College for Negroes (now North Carolina Central University) in Durham, North Carolina. She also established, in 1934, a school of dramatic arts "based on pure Negro expression" at Bethune-Cookman University (at the time, Bethune-Cookman College) in Daytona Beach, FL. In 1956 Hurston was bestowed the Bethune-Cookman College Award for Education and Human Relations in recognition of her vast achievements, and the English Department at Bethune-Cookman College remains dedicated to preserving her cultural legacy.
She died of hypertensive heart disease.
Career
Color Struck (1925), Sweat (1926), How It Feels to Be Colored Me (1928), "Hoodoo in America" (1931), The Gilded Six-Bits (1933), Jonah's Gourd Vine (1934), Mules and Men (1935), Tell My Horse (1937), Their Eyes Were Watching God (1937), Moses, Man of the Mountain (1939), Dust Tracks on a Road (1942), Seraph on the Suwanee (1948), "What White Publishers Won't Print", Negro Digest (1950), Sanctified Church (1981), Spunk: Selected Stories (1985), The Complete Stories (1995), Barracoon (1999), Collected Plays (2008)
Politics
John McWhorter has called Hurston "America's favorite black conservative" while David T. Beito and Linda Royster Beito have argued that she can better be characterized as a "libertarian." She was a Republican who was generally sympathetic to the foreign policy non-interventionism of the Old Right and a fan of Booker T. Washington's self-help politics. She disagreed with the philosophies (including Communism and the New Deal) supported by many of her colleagues in the Harlem Renaissance, such as Langston Hughes, who was in the 1930s a supporter of the Soviet Union and praised it in several of his poems. Despite much common ground with the Old Right in domestic and foreign policy, Hurston was not a social conservative. Her writings show skepticism toward traditional religion and affinity for feminist individualism. In this respect, her views were similar to two libertarian novelists who were her contemporaries, Rose Wilder Lane and Isabel Paterson.