The essay that put Hurston on the map as a new literary force was called "Sweat." It was published in 1926 in Fire!!, and it was about a woman who was in a relationship that was full of infidelity, abuse, and betrayal. "Sweat" was considered revolutionary because of its feminist themes and dialogue about the consequences of seeking independence as a Black woman.

In the 1930s, Hurston was one of many writers hired by the Works Progress Administration, a New Deal program created by Franklin D. Roosevelt, and was able to use her anthropological training to document the experiences of Black Americans living in Florida. She received a prestigious Guggenheim Fellowship in 1936 which allowed for her to travel to Haiti, where she wrote her most famous work, the novel Their Eyes Were Watching God. Published in 1937, this story was about a Black woman who was searching for love, passion, and a sense of peace in a world that rarely afforded women, especially Black women, this opportunity.

The book was criticized by many Black male writers, because they believed that Hurston did not take an explicit political stance nor did she use the book to address the impact of racism and white supremacy. Hurston, though, wasn't interested in two-dimensional depictions of Black life or in simply using her characters as pawns to make a larger political point. In her work, Hurston believed it was important to portray Black people as having hopes and desires and aspirations and failings, which is to say, she wanted to portray them as people. Thanks Thought Bubble.

Zora Neale Hurston's work broke many barriers by combining research and folklore while centering the perspectives of Black women, and judging by how widely her work is read today, you would think that she enjoyed a similarly wide readership during her own life. Well, not quite. For much of her career, Hurston struggled to sustain a mainstream audience.

She also struggled in her personal life. She married and divorced several times and also lied about her true age. At the end of her life, she worked a series of jobs to make ends meet and later suffered several strokes. She then moved to a welfare home in St. Lucie County, Florida and lived there until she died in poverty in 1960.

Hurston's work was almost forgotten, but in 1973, Alice Walker, a prominent Black American author who is best known for her novel The Color Purple, read Hurston's novels and was inspired. Walker said that she felt a personal relationship to Hurston's work and considered her the matriarch of Black literature. After Walker found Hurston's unmarked burial place in Fort Pierce, Florida, Walker bought a headstone for the grave and had it inscribed with the words "A Genius of the South."

In 1975, Alice Walker wrote an essay entitled "In Search of Zora Neale Hurston," which ultimately lifted Hurston's writing from obscurity and turned her into the most widely published Black woman author of the Harlem Renaissance. Walker later said, "I realized that, unless I came out with everything I had supporting her, there was every chance that she would slip back into obscurity."

Other authors started to acknowledge Hurston's contribution to the American literary world, as well, like Robert Hemenway - not that Hemingway - a professor of English and chancellor at the University of Kansas. His 1977 book biography of Zora Neale Hurston helped generate even more interest.

Hurston's revival also led to the republication of many of her previously out-of-print works, and the book Barracoon: The Story of the Last Black Cargo, was published posthumously in 2018. It details her interviews with Oluale Kossola, a formerly enslaved man who, at the time, was thought to be the last American survivor of the Middle Passage.

As we said before, Hurston is considered part of the Harlem Renaissance, but she took the Harlem Renaissance much further than Harlem. She used her work to elaborate on the various struggles Black Americans were experiencing all over the United States, but she was also a product of the Black South and had a specific desire to take the lived experiences and cultural expression of Black southerners seriously. Her work provided a rich literary engagement with the meaning of Black culture while it was being transformed by migration.

Hurston's work was also unique in the way that she incorporated her research methods into fiction and short stories. Her training as an anthropologist helped her portray realistic and nuanced story of Black experience, because it was based on real conversations with real people. This was the case whether she was traveling to a rural town in Florida to interview formerly enslaved people or when she traveled to Jamaica and Haiti to study religions of the African diaspora.

The great writer Toni Morrison, who is in many ways a literary descendant of Hurston, once said, "Being a black woman writer is not a shallow place but a rich place to write from. It doesn't limit my imagination; it expands it." I think of this quote often when I'm reading Zora Neale Hurston. The power of her work isn't limited by writing about the experience of Black women or by being a Black woman. In writing about specific people and specific communities, she is able to tap into a set of more universal truths, the same way famous novelists from England or Russia or America do.

She documented so many stories that might have otherwise been forgotten, and she looked at Black southerners and said, "You are worthy of literature." And we're so lucky that she did that. Thanks for watching. I'll see you next time.

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