|
|
|
|
|
|
||
|
|
Zora Neale Hurston 1891-1960
Place of Birth: Notasulga, Alabama Death Date: January 28, 1960
Table of Contents: Awards Personal Information: Born January 7, 1891, in Notasulga, AL; died January 28, 1960, in Fort Pierce, FL; daughter of John (a preacher and carpenter) and Lucy (a seamstress; maiden name, Potts) Hurston; married Herbert Sheen, May 19, 1927 (divorced, 1931); married Albert Price III, June 27, 1939 (divorced). Attended Howard University, 1923-24; Barnard College, B.A., 1928; graduate study at Columbia University. Memberships: American Folklore Society, American Anthropological Society, American Ethnological Society, Zeta Phi Beta. Occupation: Writer Career: Writer and folklorist. Collected folklore in the South, 1927-31; Bethune-Cookman College, Daytona, FL, instructor in drama, 1933-34; collected folklore in Jamaica, Haiti, and Bermuda, 1937-38; collected folklore in Florida for the Works Progress Administration, 1938-39; Paramount Studios, Hollywood, CA, staff writer, 1941; collected folklore in Honduras, 1946-48; worked as a maid in Florida, 1950; freelance writer, 1950-56; Patrick Air Force Base, FL, librarian, 1956-57; writer for Fort Pierce Chronicle and part-time teacher at Lincoln Park Academy, both in Fort Pierce, FL, 1958-59. Librarian at the Library of Congress, Washington, DC; professor of drama at North Carolina College for Negroes (now North Carolina Central University), Durham; assistant to writer Fannie Hurst. WRITINGS:
Also author of The First One (one-act play), published in Ebony and Topaz, edited by Johnson, and of Great Day (play). Work represented in anthologies, including Black Writers in America, edited by Barksdale and Kinnamon; Story in America, edited by E. W. Burnett and Martha Foley, Vanguard, 1934; American Negro Short Stories, edited by Clarke; The Best Short Stories by Negro Writers, edited by Hughes; From the Roots, edited by James; Anthology of American Negro Literature, edited by Watkins. Contributor of stories and articles to periodicals, including American Mercury, Negro Digest, Journal of American Folklore, Saturday Evening Post, and Journal of Negro History. "Sidelights"Zora Neale Hurston is considered one of the greats of twentieth-century African-American literature. Although Hurston was closely associated with the Harlem Renaissance and has influenced such writers as Ralph Ellison, Toni Morrison, Gayl Jones, Alice Walker, and Toni Cade Bambara, interest in her has only recently been revived after decades of neglect. Hurston's four novels and two books of folklore are important sources of black myth and legend. Through her writings, Robert Hemenway wrote in The Harlem Renaissance Remembered, Hurston "helped to remind the Renaissance--especially its more bourgeois members--of the richness in the racial heritage; she also added new dimensions to the interest in exotic primitivism that was one of the most ambiguous products of the age. "Hurston was born and raised in the first incorporated all-black town in America, and was advised by her mother to "jump at de sun." At the age of thirteen she was taken out of school to care for her brother's children. At sixteen, she joined a traveling theatrical troupe and worked as a maid for a white woman who arranged for her to attend high school in Baltimore. Hurston later studied anthropology at Barnard College and Columbia University with the anthropologist Franz Boas, which profoundly influenced her work. After graduation she returned to her hometown for anthropological study. The data she collected would be used both in her collections of folklore and her fictional works. "I was glad when somebody told me: `You may go and collect Negro folklore,'" Hurston related in the introduction to Mules and Men. "In a way it would not be a new experience for me. When I pitched headforemost into the world I landed in the crib of Negroism. From the earliest rocking of my cradle, I had known about the capers Br'er Rabbit is apt to cut and what the Squinch Owl says from the housetop. But it was fitting me like a tight chemise. I couldn't see it for wearing it. It was only when I was off in college, away from my native surroundings, that I could see myself like somebody else and stand off and look at my garment. Then I had to have the spyglass of anthropology to look through at that." Hurston was an ambiguous and complex figure. She embodied seemingly antipodal traits, and Hemenway described her in his Zora Neale Hurston: A Literary Biography as being "flamboyant yet vulnerable, self-centered yet kind, a Republican conservative and an early black nationalist." Hurston was never bitter and never felt disadvantaged because she was black. Henry Louis Gates, Jr., explained in the New York Times Book Review: "Part of Miss Hurston's received heritage--and perhaps the traditional notion that links the novel of manners in the Harlem Renaissance, the social realism of the 30s, and the cultural nationalism of the Black Arts movement--was the idea that racism had reduced black people to mere ciphers, to beings who react only to an omnipresent racial oppression, whose culture is `deprived' where different, and whose psyches are in the main `pathological'.... Miss Hurston thought this idea degrading, its propagation a trap. It was against this that she railed, at times brilliantly and systematically, at times vapidly and eclectically." Older black writers criticized Hurston for the frequent crudeness and bawdiness of the tales she told. The younger generation criticized her propensity to gloss over the injustices her people were dealt. According to Judith Wilson, Hurston's greatest contribution was "to all black Americans' psychic health. The consistent note in her fieldwork and the bulk of her fiction is one of celebration of a black cultural heritage whose complexity and originality refutes all efforts to enforce either a myth of inferiority or a lie of assimilation." Wilson continued, "Zora Neale Hurston had figured out something that no other black author of her time seems to have known or appreciated so well--that our home-spun vernacular and street-corner cosmology is as valuable as the grammar and philosophy of white, Western culture. "Hurston herself wrote in 1928: "I am not tragically colored. There is no great sorrow dammed up in my soul, nor lurking behind my eyes. I do not mind at all. I do not belong to the sobbing school of Negrohood who hold that nature somehow has given them a lowdown dirty deal and whose feelings are all hurt about it.... No, I do not weep at the world--I am too busy sharpening my oyster knife." Their Eyes Were Watching God is generally acknowledged to be Hurston's finest work of fiction. Still, it was controversial. Richard Wright found the book to be "counter-revolutionary" in a New Masses article. June Jordan praised the novel for its positiveness. She declared in a Black World review: "Unquestionably, Their Eyes Were Watching God is the prototypical Black novel of affirmation; it is the most successful, convincing, and exemplary novel of Blacklove that we have. Period. But the book gives us more: the story unrolls a fabulous, written-film of Blacklife freed from the constraints of oppression; here we may learn Black possibilities of ourselves if we could ever escape the hateful and alien context that has so deeply disturbed and mutilated our rightly efflorescence--as people. Consequently, this novel centers itself on Blacklove--even as Native Son rivets itself upon white hatred." Hurston's autobiography, Dust Tracks on a Road, was reissued in 1985 with many chapters that had been deleted restored. The publication of this book coincided with the rediscovery by many contemporary black writers--especially Alice Walker--of the excellence of Hurston's work. The work is lengthy and tends to ramble; Hurston organized the tome around several visions she had that signified her life as an artist. In the work she delves into her childhood, when the death of her mother sent her to a boarding school where she was ignored by her family. The autobiography also traces Hurston's out-of-fashion views of racial issues, such as her opposition to desegregation and her belief that blacks should not consider themselves victims of racism. At the time of the original release of this book in 1942, she was soundly criticized for these views from leading black authors of the day, including Richard Wright, a fact which perhaps led to her fading popularity. However, with the new material in this book, Hurston is able to explain further many of her ideas. " Dust Tracks on a Road suffers from weak structure, a tone that is too conciliatory, too many concessions to the publisher and an anticipated audience, and not enough concern with narrative development and proportion," commented Joanne M. Braxton in the Women's Review of Books. While Henry Louis Gates, Jr., noted in the New York Times Book Review that there were flaws in the book, namely with Hurston's clever prose overshadowing the interesting details of her life, he related that "Hurston's achievement in Dust Tracks is twofold. First, she gives us a writer's life--rather than an account of `the Negro Problem'--in a language [that is] dazzling.... [And] a verbal analogue of her double experiences as a woman in a male-dominated world and as a black person in a non-black world--strikes me as her second great achievement." He concluded that "black male writers caricatured Hurston as the fool. For protection, she made up significant parts of herself." Hurston's collection of short stories, Spunk, was published in 1985. She entered the title story in an Opportunity (the publication most central to the Harlem Renaissance) contest and won second prize. It concerns the huge and intimidating Spunk Banks, a man who has power over an entire town because of his intimidation. Banks has a public affair with Lena Kanty. Her husband, Joe, seeks revenge on Banks and attempts to kill him, but is shot to death by Banks instead. Eventually, Banks is haunted by a black bobcat, which many of the townspeople suspect is the ghost of Joe Kanty. Finally, Banks is killed in a grisly accident at the town mill, and the villagers quickly forget his reign of terror. In "Muttsy," another Opportunity contest winner, the tragic relationship of sheltered Pinkie and worldly Muttsy Owens is chronicled. Pinkie has been forced to live in a brothel after she runs away from home; after seeing her in the brothel, Muttsy falls for her immediately. Pinkie tries to change Muttsy's gambling addiction, forcing him to get a job before she'll become romantically involved with him. While he does get a respectable job and the two marry, Muttsy eventually resumes his gambling. Grace Ingoldby, writing in New Statesman, praised the collection, saying that "the stories in Spunk transcend the particular without any sense that Hurston knows how far she's leaping: unselfconscious, exuberant, tragi-comic, they are, to wipe the grime of overuse from a good word, brilliant." In 1995, the Library of America collected and combined much of Hurston's writings into two volumes: Folklore, Memoirs, and Other Writings, and Novels and Stories. Critics commented that her inclusion into this prestigious collection of American writers has done much to cement her work in the minds of Americans. "That we remember her today is due, of course, to the untiring work of women like Alice Walker and the literary critic Mary Helen Washington," remarked David Nicholson in the Washington Post Book World. "Black women reclaimed her. Now, with her inclusion in the Library of America, Zora Neale Hurston belongs to all of us." Joyce Irene Middleton commended both works in the Women's Review of Books: "a sustained reading of the chronology of her life... in this beautiful, two-volume Library of America collection, reanimates the complex cultural and political forces that shaped the world in which we see Zora Hurston laughing and lying, fighting and loving, speaking and writing."
"She was full of sidesplitting anecdotes, humorous tales, and tragicomic stories," Langston Hughes wrote of Hurston, "remembered out of her life in the South as a daughter of a traveling minister of God. She could make you laugh one minute and cry the next.... But Miss Hurston was clever, too--a student who didn't let college give her a broad `a' and who had great scorn for all pretensions, academic or otherwise. That is why she was such a fine folklore collector, able to go among the people and never act as if she had been to school at all. Almost nobody else could stop the average Harlemite on Lenox Avenue and measure his head with a strange-looking, anthropological device and not get bawled out for the attempt, except Zora, who used to stop anyone whose head looked interesting, and measure it." FURTHER READINGS ABOUT THE AUTHOR:
BOOKS
PERIODICALS
Source: Contemporary Authors Online, Thomson Gale, 2006. Gale Database: Contemporary Authors Online
|
