- Page 429 →Zora Neale Hurston (1891-1960) is to literature what Bessie Smith is to music, a mother of the blues. Hurston’s explorations, in fiction, of female character, her analysis of women’s concerns, and her renderings of Black vernacular speech have influenced a generation of writers just as Smith’s style and themes have influenced a generation of singers. The daughter of a minister and a schoolteacher, Hurston was born in Eatonville, Florida, the first all-Black township incorporated in the U.S. In Eatonville, Hurston participated in a range of cultural forms and institutions. She never lost interest in nor ease among the workaday masses who were creating America's music and dance, its visual style, its language; she was their first true chronicler. Trained as a folklorist (Barnard College 1928), Hurston published two collections of folklore as well as three novels during the Harlem Renaissance. Their Eyes Were Watching God (1937), her most fully achieved novel, is a lyrical tale of one woman's awakening and maturation. As the bestselling university press book of the 1980s, the novel brought Hurston, in death, the fame and admiration that had eluded her in life.
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