Zora Neale Hurston

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Standard Name: Hurston, Zora Neale
Birth Name: Zora Neale Hurston
ZNH was an anthropologist who published articles on the subject of African-American folklore, and who also wrote plays, novels, short stories, political and cultural criticism, and an autobiography. She was a central contributor to the Harlem Renaissance , and since the rediscovery of her work in the 1970s she has been recognized as a complex, powerful African-American literary foremother.
Black and white, head-and-shoulders photograph of Zora Neale Hurston smiling. She stands, wearing a small black hat and a sweater with decorated neckline. Library of Congress.

Connections

Connections Author name Excerpt
Anthologization Zadie Smith
From this year until 1997, The May Anthology of Oxford and Cambridge Short Stories annually included writing by ZS . She headed her earliest printed work, the story Mirrored Box, 1995, with a quote...
Dedications Alice Walker
She dedicated the book to Jane Cooper , Muriel Rukeyser , a friend lost track of named Eileen, and in loving memory of Zora Neale Hurston , Nella Larsen , and Jean Toomer , the...
Education Zadie Smith
ZS went to Malorees Junior School and then to Hampstead Comprehensive .
Tew, Philip. Zadie Smith. Palgrave Macmillan, 2010.
27
She was a shy, quiet girl and an overweight, anti-social adolescent, who used reading as an escape and refuge. She also loved...
Friends, Associates Eudora Welty
EW 's friendship with her fellow Mississippian William Faulkner began from an impromptu postcard he sent her from Hollywood in 1943: Dear Welty: You are doing fine. You are doing all right. . ....
Intertextuality and Influence Harriet Jacobs
HJ 's work fed into an emergent tradition of black American writing. Frances E. W. Harper 's ground-breaking novel Iola Leroy; or, Shadows Uplifted was probably influenced by her (its central black characters, from North...
Occupation Alice Walker
Walker closed her stay at the Radcliffe Institute with homage to Zora Neale Hurston , whose writings and life-story she had only recently discovered. She borrowed a curse-prayer from Hurston's Mules and Men, and...
Occupation Alice Walker
Among AW 's many lecturing engagements was one at Spelman College where she spoke on oppressed hair, that is black hair artificially straightened. She established there an annual Zora Neale Hurston -Langston Hughes Award...
Textual Features Adrienne Rich
AR 's delineation of a lesbian continuum . . . of woman-identified experience
Rich, Adrienne. Blood, Bread, and Poetry. Norton, 1986.
51
became one of her most controversial and influential theories. Rejecting established definitions of lesbianism as pathology, she means to acknowledge the...
Textual Production Nancy Cunard
The original book was 855 pages long; it measured twelve inches by ten and half; it was two inches thick; it weighed eight pounds. The title, NEGRO, ran diagonally in large red capitals across...
Textual Production Mavis Gallant
Despite this promising request, she received no news regarding the subsequent stories she submitted from Europe. While living in poverty in Madrid, MG happened across one of her recently submitted stories, One Morning in...
Textual Production Ali Smith
In addition to these collaborative works, AS has published an anthology of her own favourite texts, those she sees as essential to her development as a writer. Published twice under different titles—The Reader (2006)...
Textual Production Alice Walker
In 1977 AW contributed a foreword to Robert Hemenway 's Zora Neale Hurston: A Literary Biography, the first full-length study of Hurston ; she also offered support to its (white) author.
White, Evelyn. Alice Walker. A Life. Norton, 2004.
255-6
Textual Production Alice Walker
Two years later she edited for the Feminist Press a collection of Hurston's shorter works (many of them out of print). She entitled the volume (in words borrowed from her author) I Love Myself When...
Theme or Topic Treated in Text Alice Walker
AW writes here about love and disillusionment, about political figures like Malcolm X and Martin Luther King , about writers she admired, like Bessie Head , or like Zora Neale Hurston , Nella Larsen ...
Theme or Topic Treated in Text Alice Walker
The title essay praises the long-suppressed creativity of black women, and its outlets in quilt-making, preserving food, gardens, songs, and stories. Some other essays, like this one, have titles that subsume their contents, like Saving...

Timeline

8 May 2008
Virago Press marked thirty years of Virago Modern Classics by re-issuing works by Barbara Pym , E. M. Delafield , Elizabeth Taylor , Jacqueline Susann , Muriel Spark , Helene Hanff , Zora Neale Hurston , and Angela Carter .

Texts

Hurston, Zora Neale. Barracoon. The Story of the Last Black Cargo. Editor Plant, Deborah G., HarperCollins, 2018.
Hurston, Zora Neale. Dust Tracks on a Road. J. B. Lippincott, 1942.
Hurston, Zora Neale. Folklore, Memoirs, and Other Writings. Library of America, 1995.
Hurston, Zora Neale. I Love Myself When I Am Laughing . . . And Then Again When I Am Looking Mean and Impressive: A Zora Neale Hurston Reader. Editor Walker, Alice, The Feminist Press, 1979.
Hurston, Zora Neale, and Fannie Hurst. Jonah’s Gourd Vine. J. B. Lippincott, 1934.
Hurston, Zora Neale. Moses, Man of the Mountain. J. B. Lippincott, 1939.
Hurston, Zora Neale, and Langston Hughes. Mule Bone. HarperPerennial, 1991.
Hurston, Zora Neale. Mules and Men. J. B. Lippincott, 1935.
Hurston, Zora Neale. Novels and Stories. Library of America, 1995.
Hurston, Zora Neale. Seraph on the Suwanee. Scribner’s, 1948.
Hurston, Zora Neale. Tell My Horse. J. B. Lippincott, 1938.
Hurston, Zora Neale. Their Eyes Were Watching God. J. B. Lippincott, 1937.
Hurston, Zora Neale. Zora Neale Hurston: A Life in Letters. Editor Kaplan, Carla, Doubleday, 2001.