Novelist, anthropologist, and folklorist — the most exuberant prose stylist of the Harlem Renaissance and, for a long generation after her death, its most unjustly neglected figure. Born in Notasulga, Alabama, raised in Eatonville, Florida — the all-Black incorporated town that would become the imaginative ground of her work — Hurston trained in anthropology under Franz Boas at Barnard and returned to the South and the Caribbean to collect the folk speech, songs, and religious practices she would weave into her fiction.
Their Eyes Were Watching God (1937), her masterwork, is the story of Janie Crawford's three marriages and her voice's long coming-into-itself — written in a free-indirect rendering of Black Southern vernacular that was, at the time, without precedent in American fiction. Richard Wright and Alain Locke dismissed it as apolitical; it is in fact a profoundly political book about a woman's self-possession, but its politics run through pleasure, speech, and sexuality rather than protest. Mules and Men (1935) and Tell My Horse (1938) are her great ethnographic works on Black Southern folklore and Haitian Vodou.
She died in poverty in Florida in 1960 and was buried in an unmarked grave. Alice Walker's 1975 pilgrimage to find that grave and her essay "In Search of Zora Neale Hurston's Garden" restored Hurston to the center of African American letters, where she has remained.