Hurston, Zora Neale 211bought the manuscript and paid Hurston a $200 advance.
Th is book marked a breakthrough for Hurston, and she
went on to write the important American novel Th eir Eyes
Were Watching God (1937) in Haiti over the course of
seven weeks. Today, this work is seen as depicting an early
feminist protagonist, Janie Crawford. Th e central charac-
ter experiences several love relationships, including a most
passionate love aff air with Tea Cake, only to see the aff air
dissolve under tragic circumstances. In the end, it becomes
a story about Janie’s journey and discovery of “self.” Oprah
Winfrey produced Th eir Eyes Were Watching God for televi-
sion in 2005. Starring Halle Berry as Janie Crawford, the
novel was adapted by Suzan-Lori Parks, the fi rst African
American woman to win a Pulitzer Prize for Drama.
Aft er a period of prolifi c writing, Huston spent her
fi nal years in Florida, where she worked as a librarian,
newspaper freelancer, substitute teacher, and maid. In the
literary world, she all but vanished into obscurity during
her later life. Publishers rejected her fi nal attempt at a full-
length project based on the life of the biblical Herod. By
early 1959, Hurston, already suff ering from high blood
pressure, gall bladder attacks, an ulcer, and malnutrition,
had a stroke. In October of that year, Hurston was moved
from her home at 1734 School Court Street in St. Pierce,
Florida, to Saint Lucie County Welfare Home, where she
died on January 28, 1960. Hurston was buried in an un-
marked grave in the segregated Garden of the Heavenly
Rest Cemetery in St. Pierce. In 1973, writer Alice Walker
traveled to Florida and placed a gravestone on her burial
site that reads, “Zora Neale Hurston, A Genius of the
South, Novelist, Folklorist, Anthropologist, 1901–1960.” In
all, Hurston published seven full-length books and over 75
short stories, plays, and articles and wrote numerous pieces
of unpublished materials.
See also: Black Folk Culture; Harlem Renaissance; Hoodoo;
Hughes, Langston; New Negro MovementJayetta SlawsonBibliography
Cronin, Gloria L., ed. Critical Essays on Zora Neale Hurston. New
York: G. K. Hall, 1998.
Hemenway, Robert E. Zora Neale Hurston: A Literary Biography.
Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1977.
Hughes, Langston, and Zora Neale Hurston. Mule Bone: A Com-
edy of Negro Life. New York: HarperPerennial, 1991.
Hurston, Zora Neale. Dust Tracks on a Road. 1942. Reprint, New
York: HarperPerennial, 1996.that assisted in her eff orts to document black folklore. Hur-
ston published a collection of folktales in 1931, “Hoodoo in
America,” in the Journal of American Folklore, and subse-
quently in 1935 repeated some of the same material in the
book Mules and Men. Written in two parts, Mules and Men
is a narrative of Hurston’s journey back home to Eatonville
to collect folklore and is a compilation of tall tales, songs,
sermons, and stories that both Hurston and her informants
call “lies”; part 2 of the book is both a travelogue and the
fi rst scholarly treatment by a black American scholar of New
Orleans hoodoo culture. Hurston’s journey into hoodoo
involved undergoing fi ve separate initiations by religious
practitioners and included study with a supposed relative of
New Orleans’ most famous practitioner, Marie Laveau. In
Mules and Men and Tell My Horse: Voodoo and Life in Haiti
and Jamaica (published in England under the name Voo-
doo Gods), Hurston links American and Caribbean prac-
tices and treats voodoo as a complex, old religion, worthy of
spiritual possibilities and serious study and respect.
In 1930, Hurston collaborated with her friend Langs-
ton Hughes on a three-act play, which was not produced or
published in their lifetimes because of what Hughes would
label as a falling-out. Mules Bone, a comedy adapted from
Hurston’s collected folktale “Th e Bone of Contention,” was
written in hopes of portraying black characters in a spir-
ited and favorable light. However, aft er contentious argu-
ing over rights to the play, the longtime friendship between
Hurston and Hughes dissolved, and the drama was largely
forgotten until 1991, when the Lincoln Center Th eatre in
New York staged the play.
Hurston was drawn to the theater at various points in
her life as a writer, director, and performer. On January 10,
1932, with borrowed money, she mounted a show at the
John Golden Th eatre consisting of the work songs, blues,
and spirituals collected during her fi eldwork. Although she
went on to produce additional versions of this show under
various names throughout her career, Hurston is not re-
membered as much for her dramatic texts as she is for her
novels, short stories, and magazine and newspaper articles.
Th e short story “Th e Gilded Six-Bits” was published
in Story Magazine in August 1933. Shortly thereaft er, Hur-
ston, who was living in Florida at the time, was approached
by the J. B. Lippincott Company about whether she had
a book-length project. Th is inquiry prompted Hurston
to move to Sanford, where she wrote Jonah’s Gourd Vine
(1934) over a three-month period. Lippincott subsequently