Zora Neale Hurston was born on
January 7, 1891, in Notasulga, Alabama, to
John Hurston, a carpenter and Baptist preacher, and Lucy Potts Hurston,
a former schoolteacher. Hurston was the fifth of eight children, and
while she was still a toddler, her family moved to Eatonville, Florida,
the first all-black incorporated town in the United States, where
John Hurston served several terms as mayor. In 1917,
Hurston enrolled in Morgan Academy in Baltimore, where she completed
her high school education.
Three years later, she enrolled at Howard University and
began her writing career. She took classes there intermittently
for several years and eventually earned an associate degree. The
university’s literary magazine published her first story in 1921.
In 1925, she moved to New York and became
a significant figure in the Harlem Renaissance. A year later, she,
Langston Hughes, and Wallace Thurman organized the journal Fire!, considered
one of the defining publications of the era. Meanwhile, she enrolled
in Barnard College and studied anthropology with arguably the greatest
anthropologist of the twentieth century, Franz Boas. Hurston’s life
in Eatonville and her extensive anthropological research on rural
black folklore greatly influenced her writing.
Their Eyes Were Watching God was published
in 1937, long after the heyday of the Harlem
Renaissance. The literature of the 1920s,
a period of postwar prosperity, was marked by a sense of freedom
and experimentation, but the 1930s brought
the Depression and an end to the cultural openness that had allowed
the Harlem Renaissance to flourish. As the Depression worsened,
political tension increased within the United States; cultural production came
to be dominated by “social realism,” a gritty, political style associated
with left-wing radicalism. The movement’s proponents felt that art
should be primarily political and expose social injustice in the
world. This new crop of writers and artists dismissed much of the
Harlem Renaissance as bourgeois, devoid of important political content
and thus devoid of any artistic merit. The influential and highly
political black novelist Richard Wright, then an ardent Communist,
wrote a scathing review of Their Eyes Were Watching God upon
its publication, claiming that it was not “serious fiction” and that
it “carries no theme, no message, no thought.”
Hurston was also criticized for her comportment: she refused
to bow to gender conventions, and her behavior often seemed shocking
if not outrageous. Although she won a Guggenheim Fellowship and
had published prolifically (both works of fiction and anthropological
works), Hurston fell into obscurity for a number of years. By the
late 1940s, she began to have increasing
difficulty getting her work published. By the early 1950s,
she was forced to work as a maid. In the 1960s,
the counterculture revolution continued to show disdain for any
literature that was not overtly political, and Zora Neale Hurston’s
writing was further ignored.
A stroke in the late 1950s forced
Hurston to enter a welfare home in Florida. After she died penniless
on January 28, 1960, she was buried in an
unmarked grave. Alice Walker, another prominent African-American
writer, rediscovered her work in the late 1960s. In 1973,
Walker traveled to Florida to place a marker on Hurston’s grave
containing the phrase, “A Genius of the South.” Walker’s 1975 essay,
“In Search of Zora Neale Hurston,” published in Ms. magazine,
propelled Hurston’s work back into vogue. Since then, Hurston’s
opus has been published and republished many times; it has even
been adapted for the cinema: Spike Lee’s first feature film, She’s
Gotta Have It, parallels Their Eyes Were Watching
God and can be viewed as an interesting modern adaptation
of the novel.
One of the strengths of Hurston’s work is that it can
be studied in the context of a number of different American literary
traditions. Most often, Their Eyes Were Watching God is
associated with Harlem Renaissance literature, even though it was
published in a later era, because of Hurston’s connection to that
scene. Certain aspects of the book, though, make it possible to
discuss it in other literary contexts. For example, some critics
argue that the novel should be read in the context of American Southern
literature: with its rural Southern setting and its focus on the
relationship between man and nature, the dynamics of human relationships,
and a hero’s quest for independence, Their Eyes Were Watching
God fits well into the tradition that includes such works
as Mark Twain’s The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn and
William Faulkner’s The Sound and the Fury. The
novel is also important in the continuum of American feminist literature,
comparing well to Kate Chopin’s The Awakening. More specifically,
and due in large part to Alice Walker’s essay, Zora Neale Hurston
is often viewed as the first in a succession of great American black
women writers that includes Alice Walker, Toni Morrison, and Gloria
Naylor. But Their Eyes Were Watching God resists reduction
to a single movement, either literary or political. Wright’s criticism
from 1937 is, to a certain extent, true:
the book is not a political treatise—it carries no single, overwhelming
message or moral. Far from being a weakness, however, this resistance
is the secret of the novel’s strength: it is a profoundly rich,
multifaceted work that can be read in a number of ways.
