Essays on Zora Neale Hurston

January 7, 1891

January 28, 1960

Folklorist, anthropologist, ethnographer, novelist, short story writer, filmmaker

The Harlem Renaissance

• Their Eyes Were Watching God

• “Love makes your soul crawl out from its hiding place.”
• “If you are silent about your pain, they’ll kill you and say you enjoyed it.”
• “Research is formalized curiosity. It is poking and prying with a purpose.”

January 7, 1891 – January 28, 1960

Zora Neale Hurston was an American author, anthropologist, and filmmaker. She portrayed racial struggles in the early-1900s American South and published research on hoodoo. The most popular of her four novels is Their Eyes Were Watching God, published in 1937. She also wrote more than 50 short stories, plays, and essays.

“Their Eyes Were Watching God”, “Dust Tracks on a Road”, “Every Tongue Got to Confess”, “Jonah’s Gourd Vine”, “Moses, Man of the Mountain”, “Mule Bone”, “Mules and Men”, “Spunk: The Selected Stories”, “Tell My Horse”

Hurston's novels, short stories, and plays often depicted African American life in the South. The major themes include gender, love, sex, innocence, race, fate and free will, society and class, freedom and confinement.

Zora Neale Hurston was a scholar whose ethnographic research made her a pioneer writer of “folk fiction” about the black South, making her a prominent writer in the Harlem Renaissance. Hurston influenced many writers, forever cementing her place in history as one of the foremost female writers of the 20th century.

“There are years that ask questions and years that answer.”
“Love makes your soul crawl out from its hiding place.”
“Sometimes, I feel discriminated against, but it does not make me angry. It merely astonishes me. How can any deny themselves the pleasure of my company? It’s beyond me.”