Zora Neale Hurston Facts
Zora Neale Hurston Facts
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| Interesting Zora Neale Hurston Facts: |
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| Zora Hurston was the fifth of eight children and was born in Notasulga, Alabama, where her father was a Baptist minister and tenant farmer. |
| In 1887 Eatonville, Florida became the first all-black town in the United States. |
| John Hurston moved his family there in 1894 and became the town mayor in 1897. |
| Hurston wrote about Eatonville in her stories and praised it as a place where black Americans could live without the strictures of white society. |
| She described her experiences of living in Eatonville as a child in the 1928 essay, "How it feels to Be Colored Me." |
| After her mother died in 1904, Hurston attended a Baptist boarding school in Jacksonville, Florida. |
| She left school before graduation and worked for the traveling Gilbert & Sullivan theatrical company. |
| In 1917 she entered the high school division of Morgan State University, a black college in Baltimore, Maryland. |
| In order to be eligible to attend Morgan College, she claimed she was born in 1901 and was only sixteen rather than twenty-six. |
| After high school graduation in 1918 she entered Howard University. |
| She was one of the founding members of Zeta Phi Beta, an international historically black sorority. |
| She co-founded the student newspaper, The Hilltop. |
| Hurston earned her associate degree in 1920. |
| In 1921 she wrote John Redding Goes to Sea and became a member of the literary club, The Stylus, founded by Alaine Locke. |
| In 1925 she was offered a scholarship to Barnard College, Columbia University, and was the school's only black student. |
| The 1920s were peak times for the Harlem Renaissance and Hurston was one of its important writers; in 1925 she wrote "Spunk," and it was selected for publication in The New Negro literary magazine. |
| In 1926 she, Langston Hughes, and Wallace Thurman produced a literary magazine called Fire!! |
| While at Barnard, she conducted research with famous anthropologist Franz Boas and was student with Margaret Mead and Ruth Benedict. |
| She received a B.A. in anthropology in 1928 and from 1928 to 1932 conducted research in the American south. |
| In 1935 she published of Mules and Men which contained folk stories from the timber camps in north Florida and in 1934 published her novel Jonah's Gourd Vine on the same topic. |
| In 1936 and 1937 she received a Guggenheim Fellowship to work in Jamaica and Haiti, the results of which she used in her 1938 book, Tell My Horse. |
| From October 1947 to February 1948 she worked in Honduras and became interested in the multi-cultural local population. |
| Although controversial at the time, she is now considered an important American writer. |
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