After what she called her ‘ years of wandering’ –a decade in which there is no record of her whereabouts, she returned to school as a 26 year old masquerading as a 16 year old in order to qualify for free education where she gained her high school diploma at Howard University, Barnard College and Columbia University. The fifth of eight children, shortly after the death of her mother at the age of 13 and her father’s remarriage, the family left Eatonville causing Hurston to drop-out of school. Her father was the town’s mayor and later the church pastor. It is often noticed that her writings reveal no recollection of her Alabama beginnings as, for Hurston, Eatonville was always home. ![]() In Eatonville, Zora was never indoctrinated in inferiority, and she could see the evidence of black achievement all around her. Hurston’s early career conducted anthropological and ethnographic research which would see her become the most successful and most significant black woman writer of the first half of the 20th century.īorn in in Notasulga, Alabama, to enslaved parents, Hurston moved with her family to Eatonville, Florida – the first self-governing all-black town run by African Americans – when she was still a toddler. Zora Neale Hurston was a world-renowned (short-story) writer, essayist, playwright, author, anthropologist, novelist and folklorist associated with the Harlem Renaissance who celebrated the African American culture of the rural South her writing often explored racial struggles in the early 20th century American South, and research on Haitian voodoo. It merely astonishes me How can any deny themselves the pleasure of my company? It’s beyond me…’ ‘Sometimes, I feel discriminated against, but it does not make me angry. ‘I have the nerve to walk my own way, however hard, in my search for reality, rather than climb upon the rattling wagon of wishful illusions.’ – Letter from Zora Neale Hurston to Countee Cullen ![]() ![]() Week four: 22-28th Oct – Scholars and Academics
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