Zora Neale Hurston grew up in Eatonville, Florida — the first incorporated all-Black municipality in the United States. She grew up surrounded by Black community, Black language, Black storytelling, Black self-governance. That world formed the bedrock of everything she wrote.

She arrived in Harlem in 1925 with a dollar and fifty cents in her pocket and quickly became one of the most dynamic figures of the Harlem Renaissance. She had a gift for language that was immediately recognizable — the way she rendered the sound and rhythm of Black Southern speech on the page, not as dialect comedy the way white writers did it, but as music, as wisdom, as full human expression.

She studied anthropology at Barnard College under Franz Boas, one of the founders of modern anthropology, and combined her academic training with her insider knowledge as a Southerner to document Black folklore in ways that no outsider could have accessed. She traveled through the rural South and the Caribbean collecting stories, songs, and traditions that were at risk of being lost. She published Mules and Men in 1935 — the first book of Black American folklore written by a Black American.

In 1937, while on a Guggenheim fellowship in Haiti, she wrote Their Eyes Were Watching God in seven weeks. The novel follows Janie Crawford through three marriages and toward self-determination, told in the rich vernacular of Black Florida. It is a novel about Black interiority — about what a Black woman wants, feels, and chooses — written entirely on its own terms.

The response from some of her contemporaries was withering. Richard Wright, in a review, said the novel had no political consciousness and existed purely to entertain white readers. Alain Locke dismissed it. The criticism stung and shaped her reputation for decades.

What they were actually criticizing was her refusal to write about Black suffering primarily for the consumption and education of white audiences. She wrote Black life from the inside. She wrote joy, humor, desire, community, conflict — the full complexity of Black experience — because those things were worth writing about on their own terms.

By the 1950s, her books were out of print. She was largely forgotten by the literary establishment. In 1950, a reporter found her working as a maid in Miami and wrote a story about it. She was furious and responded with characteristic defiance. She kept writing until she couldn't.

She suffered a stroke in 1959 and entered the St. Lucie County Welfare Home in Fort Pierce, Florida. She died there on January 28, 1960. Her neighbors raised money to pay for her funeral. She was buried in the Garden of Heavenly Rest in Fort Pierce in an unmarked grave.

In 1975, Alice Walker drove to Fort Pierce, found the approximate location of the grave in an overgrown field, and placed a marker there. She then published "In Search of Zora Neale Hurston" in Ms. Magazine. That essay began Hurston's restoration to the American literary canon she should never have left.