Zora Neale Hurston, Independent Woman

Zora Neale Hurston proves to be a study in contrasts: a black writer reaching a white audience, a woman struggling in a man's profession, an independent thinker living in a conformist era. Now,46 almost 50 years since her death, her hard work and fabulous novels still have much to teach the modern audience. She overcame the challenges she faced and47 demonstrated that perseverance makes anything possible.

Hurston ascribed much of her deeply individualistic48 personality to the experience of growing up in Eatonville, Florida. The town was unique in that it was particularly hot in the summer, but mild at other times of the year.49 Hurston always said growing up in a community totally separate from the larger white society allowed her a freedom that50 independence not available to everyone in the south.

[1] Hurston began her undergraduate studies at Howard University, but her obvious intelligence and talent51 soon earned her a scholarship to Barnard College in New York City. [2] Moving north in the 1920s thrust52 her into the midst of the Harlem Renaissance, a black cultural movement that spawned exceptional achievements in literature, books, poems, and plays,53 art, and music. [3] Interacting with the likes of Langston Hughes, W.E.B. DuBois, Billie Holiday, and Duke Ellington, Hurston developed54 her skills as a writer and published numerous short stories and poems. [4] The most influential work that came to define her career grew out of her attempt to capture the black experience. [5] That novel, called Their Eyes Were Watching God, traced three generations of a family living in Eatonville. [6] Her interesting56 representation of the southern dialect caused her Harlem Renaissance contemporaries to belittle the work for what they saw as its propagation of inaccurate stereotypes. [7] Hurston, however, remained true to it,57 convinced that the accuracy of her representation would ultimately prevail over the political pressures her peers sought to inflict upon her.

History has shown that Hurston was right. However, modern59 critics admire her authentic and skillful representation of the language as well as her realistic portrayal of daily life in the early twentieth century. She is universally applauded, as one of the best writers of her era,60 ranked with Toni Morrison, Maya Angelou, and Alice Walker as one of the most important African-American writers of all time.