About the Author, Zora Neale Hurston

1. About the Author, Zora Neale Hurston • Born on January 7, 1891?, in Notasulga, Alabama • Age 3 moved to Eatonville, Florida • Father was a preacher and carpenter and mother was a school teacher. • Attended Morgan Academy in Baltimore. • 1918 Attended Howard Prep School in D.C. • 1925 Attended Bernard College and studied Anthropology with Franz Boas. • 1928 Attended Howard University and received a B.A. in anthropology from Barnard College. • Died on January 28, 1960 in St. Lucie County Welfare Home of “hypertensive heart disease,” buried in an unmarked grave in the Garden of Heavenly rest, Fort Pierce.

2. Hurston’s Success • Considered a product of the Harlem Renaissance • A period of cultural, literary, and artistic blossoming in the 1920s and 1930s in the African-American communities • Her works celebrated blackness, and she became an enthusiastic contributor to the New Negro Renaissance literary movement. • Though between 1927 and 1931 Hurston collected substantial material from communication in Alabama and Florida. For several years, she was unable to get any of it published. • She published five novels and is best known for the novel, Their Eyes Were Watching God, 1937. • Other published works… • Jonah’s Gourd Vine was published in 1934. • Moses Man of the Mountain was published in 1939. • Author of eight books, wrote an autobiography and 50 shorter works.

3. Literary Elements/Style Effects • Genre: Bildungsroman (coming-of-age novel) • Style: written in a split of “high” decorative (figures of speech) and “low” colloquial (everyday language, includes slang) • Southern Dialect/Black English, including rhythm and word choice • Oral features, or heard speech • Colorful Figurative language: imagery, metaphors, symbolism • Personification • Biblical images/references • Motifs: recurring theme/contrast within a novel/text • Loveless marriages • Verbal & physical abuse • A “passionate affair between a younger man and an older woman from different stations in life”