Zora Neale Hurston

Zora Neale Hurston (1891–1960) was born on 7 January 1891 in Notasulga, Alabama, and grew up in Eatonville, Florida — one of the first incorporated all-Black municipalities in the United States. Her father, John Hurston, was a Baptist preacher and three-time mayor of Eatonville; her mother, Lucy Ann Potts Hurston, was a schoolteacher who encouraged Zora’s fierce independence. Eatonville — its front porches, its lying sessions, its vernacular storytelling tradition — became the wellspring of Hurston’s art.

Life and Career

Hurston’s mother died in 1904, and her subsequent adolescence was difficult: she was bounced between relatives, worked as a maid, and did not finish high school until she was twenty-six (she routinely lied about her age, claiming to have been born in 1901). She attended Howard University, where she joined the literary society Stylus and began publishing stories, and then transferred to Barnard College in 1925, where she studied anthropology under Franz Boas — the most important anthropologist in America — and became the only Black student at the college.

Hurston was one of the central figures of the Harlem Renaissance: she collaborated with Langston Hughes on the play Mule Bone (a collaboration that ended in a bitter dispute), contributed to the legendary single issue of the magazine Fire!! (1926), and was known for her wit, her flamboyance, and her refusal to be constrained by any political or literary orthodoxy.

Her anthropological fieldwork — funded by a patron, Charlotte Osgood Mason — took her to the rural South and to Haiti and Jamaica, where she collected the folklore, hoodoo practices, and oral narratives that became Mules and Men (1935) and Tell My Horse (1938). These books are foundational works of African American folklore and anthropology.

Their Eyes Were Watching God (1937), written in seven weeks in Haiti, is her masterpiece: the story of Janie Crawford’s three marriages and her journey toward self-discovery, told in a voice that moves between standard English narration and the rich Black vernacular of the Florida Everglades. It is one of the great American novels.

Hurston’s later years were marked by declining reputation, financial hardship, and political isolation — her conservative politics (she opposed the Brown v. Board of Education desegregation decision) alienated her from the civil rights mainstream. She worked as a maid, a librarian, and a substitute teacher. She died on 28 January 1960 in Fort Pierce, Florida, and was buried in an unmarked grave. Her books were out of print.

In 1975, Alice Walker published the essay “In Search of Zora Neale Hurston” in Ms. magazine and placed a headstone on the grave, inscribed “A Genius of the South.” The rediscovery was one of the most dramatic literary resurrections of the twentieth century: Their Eyes Were Watching God returned to print and is now one of the most widely read and taught American novels.

Major Works and Themes

Hurston’s central achievement is the creation of a literary voice that honours and preserves Black vernacular culture — its storytelling, its humour, its music, its wisdom — without condescension, sentimentality, or apology. Her fiction celebrates the richness of ordinary Black life in a way that was revolutionary in an era when most Black writing was focused on racial protest and the depiction of suffering.

Their Eyes Were Watching God (1937) is the supreme example: Janie Crawford’s story is not primarily about racism (though racism is present) but about a woman’s search for love, autonomy, and a language adequate to her experience. The novel’s famous opening — “Ships at a distance have every man’s wish on board” — and its equally famous closing — Janie pulling in her horizon “like a great fish-net” — frame one of the most beautiful and fully realised character arcs in American fiction.

Mules and Men (1935) is the first collection of African American folklore published by an African American. It preserves the lying contests, the hoodoo practices, and the vernacular wisdom of the rural Black South with anthropological rigour and literary grace.

Critical Reception and Legacy

Hurston’s contemporaries were divided. Sterling Brown and Richard Wright criticised her for what they saw as minstrelsy — Wright’s review of Their Eyes Were Watching God dismissed it for carrying “no theme, no message, no thought.” The attack reflected the era’s insistence that Black literature serve as political protest, a demand Hurston refused.

Her posthumous rehabilitation, driven by Walker, Toni Morrison, and feminist and womanist criticism, has been total. She is now recognised as one of the most important American writers of the twentieth century and a foundational figure in African American literary history.

Key Works

• Jonah’s Gourd Vine (1934)
• Mules and Men (1935)
• Their Eyes Were Watching God (1937)
• Tell My Horse (1938)
• Moses, Man of the Mountain (1939)
• Dust Tracks on a Road (1942, autobiography)
• Seraph on the Suwanee (1948)

Collecting Hurston

Zora Neale Hurston first editions have appreciated dramatically since her rediscovery in the 1970s and are now among the most valuable African American literary first editions.

Their Eyes Were Watching God (1937, J.B. Lippincott, Philadelphia) is the primary collectible and one of the most sought-after American first editions of the 1930s. The first edition is in green cloth with the original pictorial dust jacket. Fine copies in the jacket are extremely scarce — the book sold modestly and was out of print for decades — and command $15,000–$50,000 or more. Without the jacket, $2,000–$5,000.

Jonah’s Gourd Vine (1934, Lippincott) is the first novel. Fine copies in the jacket bring $5,000–$15,000.

Mules and Men (1935, Lippincott), with illustrations by Miguel Covarrubias, first editions in the jacket bring $3,000–$10,000.

Moses, Man of the Mountain (1939, Lippincott) and Dust Tracks on a Road (1942, Lippincott) first editions bring $1,000–$5,000 each in the jacket.

Hurston signed material is rare — she did not have the means or the platform for public signings during most of her career. Inscribed copies are genuine rarities that command extraordinary premiums. Her correspondence and manuscripts are held principally at the University of Florida (the Zora Neale Hurston Collection) and at Yale’s Beinecke Library.

The Covarrubias illustrations in Mules and Men add a separate dimension of collectibility, as Covarrubias is independently collected as an illustrator and caricaturist.