Zora Hurston was an American writer and folklorist, who influenced the Harlem Renaissance writers of the 1930's, as well as later black American authors. She was born in Eatonville, Florida on January 7, 1891. Eatonville was the first incorporated all-black town in the United States, which figured prominently in her later fiction and collections of folklore. Born in Eatonville, Florida, Hurston was educated at Howard University, at Barnard College and at Columbia University, where she studied under German-American anthropologist Franz Boas. .
Hurston's folklore collections include Mules and Men (published in 1935), based on her field research in the American South and Tell My Horse (published in 1938), which describes folk customs in Haiti and Jamaica. As a fiction writer, Hurston is noted for her metaphorical language, her story-telling abilities and her interest in and celebration of Southern black culture in the United States. Her best known novel is Their Eyes Were Watching God (published in 1937), in which she tracked a Southern black woman's search, over 25 years and 3 marriages, for her true identity and a community in which she could develop that identity. .
Other literary output includes such novels as Jonah's Gourd Vine (1934) and Seraph on the Suwanee (1948) short stories, plays, journal articles and an autobiography, Dust Tracks on a Road (1942). Hurston's work was not political in nature, but her characters' use of dialect, her manner of portraying black culture and her conservatism created controversy within the black community. Throughout her career she addressed issues of race and gender, often relating them to the search for freedom. In her later years, Hurston experienced health problems and she died impoverished and unrecognized by the literary community. Her writings, however, were rediscovered in the 1970s by a new generation of black writers, most notably Alice Walker.
