Portrait of Zora Neale Hurston
Meet the Author

Zora Neale Hurston

American · 1891–1960 · Novelist, folklorist, and anthropologist

Portrait: Carl Van Vechten, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons

A novelist and folklorist who grew up in the all-Black town of Eatonville, Florida, and put its people’s speech on the page with affection and precision.

2 StoryBites Editions1 Big Book1 Short story
Start with Sweat → Browse the editions

Why read Zora Neale Hurston?

Sweat is short and hard: a washerwoman named Delia, a cruel husband named Sykes, and a rattlesnake, in a story that works like a parable about who deserves what. Their Eyes Were Watching God follows Janie Crawford through three marriages as she works out what she wants from love and from her own life, moving from a store porch in Eatonville to the Florida Everglades. In both, Hurston lets her characters talk in their own Southern Black speech, and the dialogue is where much of the meaning lives. Start with Sweat to learn her voice, then go on to the novel.

A life in six dates

  1. 1891Born in Notasulga, Alabama; her family soon moves to Eatonville, Florida
  2. 1926Publishes Sweat in Fire!!, a one-issue magazine of young Harlem Renaissance writers
  3. 1928Graduates from Barnard College, where she studied anthropology with Franz Boas
  4. 1935Publishes Mules and Men, a collection of Southern Black folklore
  5. 1937Publishes Their Eyes Were Watching God, which she said she wrote in about seven weeks in Haiti
  6. 1942Publishes her autobiography, Dust Tracks on a Road
  7. 1960Dies in Fort Pierce, Florida, and is buried in an unmarked grave
  8. 1973Alice Walker marks an unmarked grave in the area where she was buried with a headstone, reviving interest in her work

Themes across the collection

American literatureHarlem RenaissanceFeminismMarriageBetrayal and loyaltySurvivalNovelsLove and desire

The StoryBites Editions

Big Books 1

Short stories 1

Context that actually matters

Eatonville, FloridaIncorporated in 1887, Eatonville was one of the first all-Black towns incorporated in the United States. Hurston grew up there, and it is the setting for Sweat and for much of the novel.
The Harlem RenaissanceIn the 1920s Hurston, Langston Hughes, and other Black writers and artists in New York built a new literature of Black life, though Hurston’s rural Southern settings and dialect set her apart from many of them.
The 1928 Okeechobee hurricaneThe storm drowned thousands of people around Lake Okeechobee, many of them Black farmworkers, and the hurricane in Their Eyes Were Watching God is based on it.