Women’s Writing in the British Isles from the Beginnings to the Present
Zora Neale Hurston
-
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.
"Zora Neale Hurston" Retrieved from https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/5/57/Hurston-Zora-Neale-LOC.jpg.This work is licensed under the Creative Commons CC0 1.0 Universal (CC0 1.0) Public Domain Dedication license. This work is in the public domain.
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...
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
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...
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...
