Zora Neale Hurston

Zora Neale Hurston was an American writer, folklorist and anthropologist, born on 7 January 1891 in Notasulga, Alabama. She grew up in Eatonville, Florida, one of the first towns in the United States incorporated by African Americans, and it shaped much of her later work. She studied at Howard University and then at Barnard College, where she trained in anthropology. In the 1920s she became part of the Harlem Renaissance.

Hurston collected African American and Caribbean folktales, and she wrote novels, stories, essays, plays and an autobiography. Her ear for everyday Black speech gave her fiction a vivid, musical voice. She was successful in the 1930s, but she died on 28 January 1960 in relative poverty and her books were out of print. Writers such as Alice Walker helped revive interest in her work in the 1970s, and she is now regarded as one of the major American authors of the twentieth century.