Zora Neale Hurston was talented folklorist and novelist. Her fame rests on the collection of African American folklore “Mules and Men” written in 1935. Her most famous novel written in 1937 is “Their Eyes Were Watching God”. In this novel she described a journey of African American woman for her self-realization.
She was a daughter of Reverend John and Lucy Hurston, was born on January 7, 1891. Her first place to live was Notasulga, Alabama. Zora has lost her mother in her early nine. Her father married second time some time later. Both Zora and her stepmother didn’t mend to each other, so father sent her to Jacksonville city to study at school. Some time later she has entered the Morgan Academy in Baltimore. After one year of studying she graduated and went to Harvard. There she completed one year and a half of course work. She earned her B.A. in 1928 in Bernard College. She has entered this college because of secured scholarship which allow her to get there. She studied anthropology and folklore at Columbia University. Franz Boas was her mentor. He was renown anthropologist. In 1936 she was donated a Guggenheim Fellowship for travelling and gathering folklore in the British West Indies and Haiti.
Hurston has changed a great many of jobs. She worked as a manicurist, as a librarian, as a secretary, as a writer for Paramount and Warner Brothers Studios, as a drama coach at North Carolina College for Negroes. Hurston started to write being at Harvard. Her first work was a short story written for a college literary magazine Stylus. She didn’t stop to create stories. In 1925 she won the prize in the literary contest. In 1939 Morgan College donated her honorary doctorate. She wrote autobiographical work “Dust Tracks on the road”. For this fiction she has got the Annisfield Award.
Characteristics of Negro Expression” is an interesting document for a number of reasons, not just because it combines something familiar to aesthetic notion plus an essentialist epitome of racial angles, some of which , like Hurston’s cogitation on the relations between Negroes parts of body or dialect, literally link the black body with different types of expression. What makes characteristic of Negro expression a complex and somewhat text that is without any decision are the ways in which it pursuit simultaneously to dispose and to rehabilitate the category of the simple and its analogy, the artificial, as artistic resources. This work full of theory and clear facts on which the difference between different people is.
In Zora Hurstons “What White Publishers Won’t Print” all attention is centered on the Anglo-Saxon’s very little interest on the internal lives of Negroes, and because of this fact any non-Anglo-Saxon people through our edges, above the class of uneducated employee. This lack of curiosity is of greater interest than it seems at first sight. It is even of greater importance than it was in the past times. The enclosed affairs cause great influence on the nation’s stress and strain, and this gap is of huge importance of the nation’s literature in a world affairs. Thus, Great African-American author Zora Hurston caused a great influence in her sphere of creating such literature masterpieces.
Works Cited
- www.zoranealehurston.com
- www.lkwdpl.org
- www.i.am/zora