Zora Neale Hurston is an icon of the Harlem Renaissance, a Black literary and cultural movement centered in the neighborhood of Harlem, New York City in the 1920s and 1930s. Although Hurston is among the names most commonly associated with the Harlem Renaissance, her place in the movement is not uncontroversial.
Having moved to New York to pursue a Bachelor of Arts degree in anthropology at Barnard College, Hurston became friends with the actress Ethel Waters, along with the Harlem-based poets Countee Cullen and Langston Hughes. Hurston was known for her wit and charm, and easily drew attention to herself at social events. In 1928, she published "How It Feels to Be Colored Me," an essay in which she declares her forward-mindedness and ambition.
Hurston fell out with Hughes in the 1930s when creative differences arose during their collaboration on the play The Mule Bone: A Comedy of Negro Life In Three Acts. In 1937, Hurston's novel Their Eyes Were Watching God received praise from mainstream critics but provoked criticism from Harlem Renaissance writers Ralph Ellison and Richard Wright, in part because of Hurston's use of Black Southern vernacular in her writing, which some saw as reinforcing racist stereotypes and pandering to white audiences.
Their Eyes Were Watching God was also seen as running counter to other more political works by Harlem Renaissance authors. Eschewing the subject of Black anger, Hurston wrote about female sexuality, work, music, and the pleasures of Black life in a Southern small town. Wright, whose left-wing political beliefs clashed with Hurston's conservatism, stated that Hurston seemed to have "no desire whatsoever to move in the direction of serious fiction" and that her novel had "no theme, no message, no thought."
Although Hurston continued to publish books, articles, and essays for the rest of her life, she died poor in a Florida nursing home and was buried in an unmarked grave. In 1975, the novelist Alice Walker brought renewed attention to Hurston's body of work and contribution to the Harlem Renaissance with the essay "In Search of Zora Neale Hurston." Walker also traveled to give Hurston's grave a tombstone that acknowledges the author's legacy.
