Novelist, anthropologist, folklorist – Zora Neale Hurston’s work in a range of fields contributed greatly to the preservation of African-American folk traditions, as well as to American literature.
Born in Eatonville, Florida, the first incorporated all-Black city, Hurston studied anthropology at Barnard College in New York with famed scholar Franz Boas, she was the first Black woman to graduate from the college and did graduate work at Columbia University.
She conducted field work in African-American folklore all over the South. She began publishing novels; Their Eyes Were Watching God is often considered her finest novel. She taught for some years at what is now North Carolina Central University and won a Guggenheim fellowship to pursue her writing. Her 1942 autobiography, Dust Tracks on a Road, was one of her last major works; in it, she wrote, “I want a busy life, a just mind, and a timely death.” Hurston’s work encouraged the study of folklore and anthropology nationwide. Her intense focus on the lives of Black women has been of equal or greater impact.
