Zora Neale Hurston

Women Writers Season

We look forward to our live online session on Zora Neale Hurston (1891-1960), with Noreen O’Connor on Saturday 7 August 2021.

Here is some background information for readers who are new to Hurston.

Zora Neale Hurston was born in Alabama in 1891. She attended Howard University from 1919 to 1924. Her early publications were short stories, including ‘Drenched in Light’ (1924) and ‘Spunk’ (1925). From 1925 to 1927, she studied anthropology at Barnard College with Franz Boas, and undertook field work in Harlem in 1926. She co-edited the influential African-American magazine Fire! (1926) and contributed a story, ‘Sweat’.

Critic Valerie Boyle writes:

Hurston became the most successful and most significant black woman writer of the first half of the 20th century. Over a career that spanned more than 30 years, she published four novels, two books of folklore, an autobiography, numerous short stories, and several essays, articles and plays.

Source: Zora Neale Hurston website.

In her 1979 essay ‘Looking for Zora’, Alice Walker writes: ‘We are a people. A people do not throw their geniuses away. And if they are thrown away, it is our duty as artists and as witnesses for the future to collect them again for the sake of our children, and, if necessary, bone by bone.’

The understanding of Zora Neale Hurston as a writer has changed significantly in the following years, thanks to work by black scholars and writers including Alice Walker, Henry Louis Gates, Claudia Tate, and Genevieve West. Hurston’s work — once out of print and unread — has returned to print circulation, and is now widely studied in university courses.

Zora Neale Hurston was a trained, Guggheneim-award-winning anthropologist who published a number of collections of her scholarship on African diasporic folklore and culture, including Tell My Horse (1938), her book on voodoo practices in Haiti. She was also a novelist, playwright, and short-story writer. 

Alice Walker writes: ‘I became aware of my need of Zora Neale Hurston’s work some time before I knew her work existed. […] The authenticity of her material was verified by her familiarity with its context, and I was soothed by her assurance that she was exposing not simply an adequate culture but a superior one. That black people can be on occasion peculiar and comic was knowledge she enjoyed. That they could be racially or culturally inferior to whites never seems to have crossed her mind.’

Hurston’s books include:

Jonah’s Gourd Vine (1934)
Their Eyes Were Watching God (1937)
Tell My Horse (1938)
Moses, Man of the Mountain (1939)
Dust Tracks on a Road (1942)
Seraph on the Suwanee (1948)
Hitting a Straight Lick with a Crooked Stick (stories, 2020) paperback edition 2021.

Noreen O’Connor’s lecture will discuss the ways in which Hurston’s writing both records and celebrates the lives of black people in America, filling a place that is much-needed in American literature.

The session takes place on Saturday 7 August 2021 at 18.00 British Summer Time.

Links

Extract from Hitting a Straight Lick with a Crooked Stick in the New York Times (14 January 2020)
Review of Hitting a Straight Lick with a Crooked Stick in the Guardian (February 2020)
Zora Neale Hurston website
Hear a story from the collection read aloud (rather wonderfully) by Aunjanue Ellis.