Zora Neale HurstonAnyway, the force from somewhere in Space which commands you to write in the first place, gives you no choice.
You take up the pen when you are told, and write what is commanded. There is no agony like bearing an untold story inside you.
~Zora Neale Hurston
Zora Neale Hurston was born January 7, 1901, casually claiming this as her birthday (her second marriage license indicates 1910, other records indicate 1891, Notasulga, Alabama) in the town of Eatonville, the first all-black community in America, just north of Orlando. She died January 28, 1960, penniless in the St. Lucie County Welfare Home.
To paint her life story one would need not only broad strokes but a canvas stretched taunt and evenly to capture the complete coloring of her experience. Happenings, both great and hurtful, peppers the accounting of her life, all the while writing of the black experience in the South and America. Life as an artist is difficult enough, with the tortures of creativity and abject poverty. Death to us the artists is when creativity is left unexpressed. As she wrote above.
True artist, Florida author, scholar, folklorist, and anthropologist, Zora was an exceptional woman in her time. Unique and as well a scientist who produced for us a large body of work that stands equal to any body of literary work in the United States and the World.
During the renaissance of black consciousness, Miss Hurston's introduction of the common black experience effectively bore a crack in the racist isolation of America now and at that time.
Ms. Hurston's time in Volusia County is accounted beginning in January of 1934 where she taught at Bethune-Cookman College and established a program of dramatic arts "based on pure Negro expression."
Zora Dancing with children c. 1935
Photo: Alan Lomax / American Folklife Center,
Library of CongressMs. Hurstons works have increased in popularity, passing the test of time as it touches readers with boldness, singular courage and her human spirit.
The following is a partial list of her writings:
Jonah's Gourd Vine (1934)
Mules and Men (1935)
Tell My Horse (1937)
Their Eyes Were Watching God (1937)
Moses, Man of the Mountain (1939)
Dust Tracks on a Road (1942)
Seraph on the Suwanee (1948)
Sanctified Church (1981)
Mule Bone (A play written with Langston Hughes) (1996)
Spunk (1985)
The Complete Stories (1995)
Novels and Stories
Folklore, Memoirs, and Other Writings
"I am not tragically colored. There is no great sorrow dammed up in my soul, nor lurking behind my eyes."
~Zora Neale Hurston
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