Zora Neale Hurston was born in 1891 in Notasulga, Alabama, but her family relocated to Eatonville, Florida when she was very young. The town of Eatonville is the United States’ first all-Black town and Hurston’s father served as mayor for a time. Eatonville grew rapidly during Hurston’s formative years, and this setting features heavily in her fiction. As one of eight children, Hurston had a happy childhood until her mother’s tragic death in 1904. Her relationship with her father and stepmother was strained and she set out on her own to work and pursue her education. She eventually moved to New York City and became a celebrated figure of the Harlem Renaissance. Hurston’s education took place across an array of respected educational institutions, including Howard University, Barnard University, and Columbia University where she earned a degree in anthropology. As an anthropologist, Hurston traveled to Haiti and Jamaica to research folklore and spirituality. Her collection of Black folklore stories, Mules and Men, is based off her research in the Caribbean and the American South.

Growing up in Eatonville influenced Hurston immensely and instilled in her a sense of individuality and pride in Black culture, heritage, and community that she sought to portray through her writing. Her most well-known and beloved novel Their Eyes Were Watching God was published in 1937. Like “The Gilded Six-Bits,” the novel explores feminism and sexuality and is set in Eatonville in the 1930s. Hurston was married three times, but each marriage was brief and ended in divorce. Her fraught romantic life influenced the complex romantic relationships portrayed in her fiction.
 
Some of Hurston’s contemporaries, such as Richard Wright, Alain Locke, and Ralph Ellison were critical of her work for portraying Black Americans in ways they perceived as offensive and improper. Wright particularly disliked Hurston’s use of dialect and overt depictions of female sexuality. Hurston was similarly critical of Wright and responded that his use of dialect was puzzling. Hurston’s work fell out of favor during her lifetime, in part due to her refusal to focus and her writings that seemed to paint segregation in a favorable light. Although her opinions on the topic are better understood today, they are complex and controversial: she found the discriminatory intent of segregation abhorrent but viewed all-Black communities and educational institutions as places where Black Americans could thrive.

Hurston died in poverty from heart disease in 1960 and was buried in an unmarked grave. In the 1970s, Hurston’s work experienced a resurgence in popularity, in part due to the efforts of respected author Alice Walker. When Walker rediscovered Hurston’s grave, she had her tombstone engraved with the fitting epitaph: “A Genius of the South.”  Today, Hurston is renowned for her fierce intellect and her brave, compelling prose.