In 1891 in a town called Notasulga, Alabama, Zora Hurston was born among eight children. The following year she moved to Eatonville, Florida, which was considered a all black community. Growing up in this type of community Hurston was only accustomed to her own ethic group and didn't have any life experience outside her community. Her father was a strict baptist preacher that didn't take on great responsibility as a father figure. The only person that managed to keep the family together was Hurston's mother Lucy. Lucy was Hurston's motivation inhabiting her mother's “driving force and great support”, that gave her self-confidence. Later her mother died when Hurston was only eleven, but she was able to live out her years with close relatives and soon was old enough to take care of herself.
Hurston didn’t finish high school, but was still able to get into a great college. She attended Harvard University, which was considered “the nations leading African American University at that time”(528). Among here pedagogue leaders, Alain Locke contributed to Hurston's popularity. He was known for his anthology the New Negro in 1925.(528) Later she decided to move out of Harlem to pursue her dream as a literary writer after her short story published , Drenched in Light, in an African American magazine.
A biographer by the name of Robert Hemenway wrote about Hurston,which gained her even more popularity and became well known. Robert Hemenway composes, “Zora Hurston was an extraordinarily witty woman, and she acquired an instant reputation in New York for her high spirits and side-splitting tales of Eatonville life”(528). Hurston was imaged as “generous, outspoken, and an interesting conversationalist.(528) Hurston started her care...
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...was inspired in the Harlem Renaissance. The paining illustrated the fellowship of blacks. The man looking back in the image can be portrayed in Hughes poem, Visitors to the Black Belt. In the poem Hughes says “You can say Jazz on the South Side- To me it's hell on the south side. Who're you, outsider? Ask me who am I”(876). From these words I feel that the man in the picture is experiencing that the “blacks” in that era was too much focused on the causal setting of their own flourishment and wasn't focused out the outside world.
Racism still existed and “ Who're you, outsider? Ask me who am I,” was a way of saying that even though he might be living flourishingly his counterparts wouldn’t even know he existed if he tired to make it outside his element.
Work Cited
Baym, Nina. The Norton Anthology of American Literature Volume D: W.W. Norton. New York. 2012. Print
Zora Neale Hurston was born in Notasulga Alabama on, January 7, 1891. When she was a little girl her family moved to the now iconic town of Eatonville Florida. She was fifth child of eight of John Hurston and Lucy Ann Hurston. Eatonville was one of the first all-black towns to be established in the United States. Zora’s interest in literature was piqued when a couple of northern teachers, came to Eatonville and gave her books of folklore and fantasy. After her mother died, her father and new stepmother sent her to a boarding school. In 1918 Hurston began her undergraduate studies at Howard...
Hurston, Zora Neale. Their Eyes Were Watching God (1937). : Urbana, Ill.: U of Illinois P, 1937.
Hurston, Zora N. Their Eyes Were Watching God. New York: Harper & Row Publishers, 1937. Print.
Hurston's writing is a resemblance of a reflection from the ideas of the Harlem Renaissance. The time in which it was written, along with the fact that Hurston had lived in New York City caused many to label the book as a product of the Harlem Renaissance. This was a period from the end of
Alice Walker’s love of Zora Neale Hurston is well known. She was the only one who went looking for Hurston’s grave. She describes her journey to get to the unmarked grave in her book, In Search of Our Mother’s Gardens. During that journey, Walker started to feel as if Hurston is family to her, an aunt. “By this time, I am, of course, completely into being Zora’s niece… Besides, as far as I’m concerned, she is my aunt – and that of all black people as well” (Ong). Walker’s book, The Color Purple, was influenced by Hurston and her works. Walker was greatly influenced by Hurston and her book The Color Purple has similarities to Hurston’s book Their Eyes Were Watching God.
Hurston begins the essay in her birth town: Eatonville, Florida; an exclusively Negro town where whites were a rarity, only occasionally passing by as a tourist. Hurston, sitting on her porch imagines it to be a theatre as she narrates her perspective of the passing white people. She finds a thin line separating the spectator from the viewer. Exchanging stances at will and whim. Her front porch becomes a metaphor for a theater seat and the passers
He portrays the racist tendency of people to assume black men are potentially violent and dangerous. He describes about a white woman’s reaction when she and him were walking on same street but on the opposite sides during the night. He says that women seemed to be worried, she felt uneasy and she thought that he was ‘menacingly close’. He even shares his experience on how he was taken as a burglar, mistaken as a killer and forced out of a jewelers store while doing assignment for a local paper. The reason behind being kicked out of the jeweler store and women running away was because he was a black man. During that period black men were stereotyped as rapist, murderer, and gang members. These names upon a person’s personality can hinder ones feelings and can also affect ones confidence level. Thus stereotyping can cause a person to miss opportunities and the person might face difficulties in building relationships with specific types of people. (Brent
“Zora Neale Hurston: The Gilded Six-Bits.” Vida De Niki. N.p., 19 Jan. 2010. Web. 25 Mar. 2014.
Zora Neale Hurtson, considered by some sources to be Langston Hughes’ female equal. She was also considered an early feminist during the Renaissance. And she contributed to the Renaissance by providing a strong and much needed feminine voice for the ladies during this time period. Zora was the author of her two books Mules and Men, a collection of folk tales she got from the places of her travel, and Their Eyes are Watching God, a story that was famous during the twentieth century. She was the writer of the plays The Great Day, and From Sun to Sun(“Zora Neale Hurtson”). But this poet/author/play writer was not really all that much liked during her time. Her criticism of the brown .VS. board made her very unpopular. Although she started off a loved and famous writer of three areas she sadly died poor, alone and sad. Still she had a big impact on the Renaissance and she has heavily influenced writers leading up to even today(“Zora Neale
Norton Anthology of American Literature. Ed. Nina Baym. 8th ed. Vol A. New York: W.
"Zora Neale Hurston is Born." history.com. A&E Television Networks, 7 Jan. 2016. Web. 12 Jan.
...James Robert Saunders, "Womanism as the Key to Understanding Zora Neale Hurston's `Their Eyes Were Watching God' and Alice Walker's `The Color Purple'," in The Hollins Critic, Vol. XXV, No. 4, October, 1988, pp. 1-11. Reproduced by permission.
Appiah, K.A. and Gates, Henry Louis, Jr. eds. Zora Neale Hurston: Critical Perspectives Past and Present. New York: Amistad Press, Inc., 1993.
McLeod, Laura. "Zora Neale Hurston: Overview." Feminist Writers. Ed. Pamela Kester-Shelton. Detroit: St. James Press, 1996. Literature Resource Center. Web. 18 Apr. 2014.
In conclusion, Hurston was a modernist writer who dealt with societal themes of racism, and social and racial identity. She steps away from the folk-oriented style of writing other African American authors, such as Langston Hughes, and she addresses modern topics and issues that relate to her people. She embraces pride in her color and who she is. She does not hate the label of “colored” that has been placed upon her. She embraces who she is and by example, she teaches others to love themselves and the color of their skin. She is very modern. She is everybody’s Zora.