der. He was a keeper of black culture and a talent
not limited by the boundaries of genre.
In his 1926 essay “The Negro Artist and the Ra-
cial Mountain,” Hughes wrote proudly about the
“common” black folk:
These common people are not afraid of spiri-
tuals... and jazz is their child. They furnish a
wealth of colorful, distinctive material for any
artist because they still hold their own indi-
viduality in the face of American standardiza-
tions. And perhaps these common people will
give to the world its truly great Negro artist, the
one who is not afraid to be himself. (quoted in
Gates and McKay, 1268)That artist did appear in Langston Hughes, a
truly individual and prodigious talent.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Barksdale, Richard, and Keneth Kinnamon, eds. Black
Writers of America. New York: Macmillan, 1972.
Donalson, Melvin. Cornerstones: An Anthology of Af-
rican American Literature. New York: St. Martin’s
Press, 1996.
Gates, Henry Louis, and Nellie Y. McKay, eds. The
Norton Anthology of African American Literature.
New York: Norton, 1997.
Rampersad, Arnold. “Langston Hughes.” In African
American Writers, 2d ed., Vol. 1, edited by Valerie
Smith, 367–378. New York: Scribners, 2001.
Smalley, Webster. “Langston Hughes.” Quoted In Five
Plays In Drama Criticism, Vol. 3, edited by Lau-
rence J. Trudeau, 268–269. Detroit: Gale, 1993.
Melvin Donalson
Hurston, Zora Neale (1891–1960)
Born in Notasulga, Alabama, to John Hurston, a
sharecropper, carpenter, and preacher, and Lucy
Potts Hurston, a schoolteacher, Zora Neale Hur-
ston spent her childhood in Eatonville, Florida.
When in 1904 the family broke up after her moth-
er’s death, Zora was without a home. Educated
at Baltimore’s Morgan Academy (1918), Howard
Prep School (1918–19), and Howard University
(1919–24), Hurston arrived in New York City in
1925 at the height of the HARLEM RENAISSANCE. She
studied anthropology at Barnard College (1925–
1927), did field work for Franz Boas, and briefly
married Herbert Sheen. In 1935 she studied an-
thropology under Franz Boas and worked with
Alan Lomax on a Library of Congress folk music
recording project, and in 1936 she received a Gug-
genheim Fellowship to study African traditional
religions, specifically Obeah and Vodun, in the
West Indies. During the 1930s Hurston collected
valuable folklore for the Works Project Adminis-
tration (WPA) Federal Writers Project in Florida.
She briefly married Albert Price III in 1939 and
thereafter worked intermittently all through her
life as a beautician, maid, secretary, teacher, per-
former, producer, playwright, folklorist, librarian,
and substitute teacher.
When her last novel, The Seraph on the Su-
wanee (1949), was published, Hurston was falsely
accused of molesting a retarded 10-year-old boy.
Though her passport proved she was in the West
Indies at the time, the scandal destroyed her
reputation and spelled the end of her publishing
career. Desperately poor, she worked as a maid
in Miami in the 1950s, published her famous re-
actionary position against desegregation in 1954,
and in 1956 moved one last time to Fort Pierce,
Florida. She had a major stroke early in 1959, en-
tered the St. Lucie Welfare Home in Fort Pierce
in October, and died there on January 28, 1960.
She was buried in an unmarked pauper’s grave in
the Garden of Heavenly Rest, having apparently
died of starvation and neglect. Though THEIR
EYES WERE WATCHING GOD remains her most be-
loved book, Hurston’s first passion was as a col-
lector and preserver of black oral culture and folk
speech. Hurston wrote constantly, traveled end-
lessly, and was often fired. However, in the popu-
lar imagination she is a sassy young black woman
driving a Model T; toting a gun; passing as a
bootlegger; and woofin’ (lying or joking) in the
turpentine camps and juke joints of rural Florida,
Alabama, and Georgia; and studying African tra-
ditional religions.
Hurston produced an impressive body of work.
Her first novel, Jonah’s Gourd Vine (1934), whichHurston, Zora Neale 259