Zora Neale Hurston
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Part of Harlem Renaissance
Anthropologist: – visited other countries and cultures and studied how the people there lived; the
stories they told; their beliefs; their mythologies; the way they talked (their dialect)
Opponent of the “Uplift Movement”
Wrote stories that featured uneducated characters, dialect, and the communities she knew or
visited
Her anthropology inspired her fiction because she would write about what she observed while
studying other cultures; she would include the folk stories she heard people tell, the dialect she
heard them speak, and the jokes and games she saw them play
Their Eyes Were Watching God achieved some popularity when it was first published, but also
received some criticism. Some people saw it as a negative portrayal of African Americans.
Their Eyes Were Watching God lost all popularity and went out of print until the early 1970s when
Alice Walker (The Color Purple) rediscovered the book and found out that Hurston was buried in an
unmarked grave; that she wasn’t respected enough when she died to have her gravestone marked
with her name. Alice Walker found her grave and wrote “Zora Neal Hurston, A Genius of the South,
Novelist/Folklorist/Anthropologist, 1901-1960” on it. She also wrote an essay about her and the
book became popular again. It is now one of the most taught books in high school in the country.
Personality and Quotes
When other writers during the Harlem Renaissance were writing serious, tragic books of social realism,
Hurston wrote a kind of adventure/romance novel. Their Eyes… is a story of a woman’s adventure in
finding herself and finding true love. In the novel, she calls it “self-revelation” – her self is revealed to her
through the different adventures she has and the relationships she has. To get a sense of why she didn’t
write a more serious, dark book, let’s look at some of her quotes and we can get a sense of her personality
through them:
1. “Sometimes, I feel discriminated against, but it does not make me angry. It merely astonishes me. How
can any deny themselves the pleasure of my company? It's beyond me.”
2. “I do not weep at the world I am too busy sharpening my oyster knife.”
4. “Mama exhorted (urged) her children at every opportunity to 'jump at the sun.' We might not land on
the sun, but at least we would get off the ground.”
5. “It seems to me that trying to live without friends is like milking a bear to get cream for your morning
coffee. It is a whole lot of trouble, and then not worth much after you get it.”
6. “Love makes your soul crawl out from its hiding place.”
7. “Love, I find, is like singing. Everybody can do enough to satisfy themselves, though it may not impress
the neighbors as being very much.”
8. “No matter how far a person can go the horizon is still way beyond you.”
Instead of writing books that featured African Americans as model citizens complaining
about being discriminated against, she wrote books that celebrated African-American and
African culture: its stories, its way of talking (its dialect), and its personalities. She
promoted people finding freedom and happiness on their own instead of demanding it
from society. Part of the reason she was an anthropologist was that she was seeking to
discover all the greatness of African-American roots and show everyone how rich their
cultural inheritance was.
So this book features a lot of dialect. When a character speaks, she spells the words how
they would sound coming from that character.
"Love ain'tsomethin' lak uh grindstone dat's de same thing everywhere and do de same
thing tuh everything it touch. Love is lak de sea. It's uh movin' thing, but still and all, it takes
its shape from de shore it meets, and it's different with every shore" (20.7).