She moved there in 1925 with little money but much ambition, and she became well-known as the most colorful member of the artistic and literary circles of the city. Hurston published her first story in 1921 and quickly gained recognition among the writers of the newly forming Harlem Renaissance, an outpouring of artistic innovation in the African American community of Harlem. Her educational opportunities continued to grow, and she studied at Barnard College, where she worked under the eminent anthropologist Franz Boas, at Howard University, and at Columbia University, where she began work towards a Ph.D. Growing up there, where her father was mayor, Hurston was largely sheltered from the racial prejudice African Americans experienced elsewhere in America.Īt the age of fourteen, Hurston struck out on her own, working as a maid for white families, and was sent to Morgan Academy in Baltimore by one of her employers. Nevertheless, it is known that she was raised in Eatonville, Florida, which was to become the Setting for most of her fiction and was the first all-black incorporated town in the nation. She claimed in her autobiography to have been born on 7 January 1903, but family members swore she was born anywhere from 1891 to 1902. Even her date of birth remains a mystery.

But her varied life, insatiable curiosity, and profound wit made her one of the most fascinating writers America has known.

Zora Neale Hurston’s colorful life was a strange mixture of acclaim and censure, success and poverty, pride and shame.

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