Editor’s note: Here is an account of famed Florida writer Zora Neale Hurston by Eliot Kleinberg that first ran on Sept. 22, 2019. It has been updated and edited for length.
Zora Neale Hurston was one of the more vibrant personalities in Florida’s literary history.
She wrote with passion, poetry and humor about the joys and turmoils of Blacks living and dying far beyond the main roads of central and southern Florida.
“Miss Zora,” who rose to prominence, was gradually ostracized by her own people and died destitute in Fort Pierce, to be reborn as only an artist can be: through her work.
Her mother once told her, “You jump at de sun.” “We might not land on the sun,” Hurston explained, “but at least we would get off the ground.”
She was born Jan. 7, 1891 in Alabama but was raised in Eatonville, north of Orlando. It was America’s first incorporated all-Black town when it was founded in 1887. Black residents of adjacent Maitland, most of them freed slaves, had bought 112 acres and named the place for Josiah Eaton, a local white landowner who’d helped them with the purchase.
The initial population was 300; a century later it would be 3,000.
After Hurston’s mother died, her father, a tenant farmer and pastor, handed her off to relatives. She was a maid, graduated from high school and attended Howard University in Washington.
She was 30 when she wrote her first story in 1921 but lied about her age by a decade, making her an undeserving prodigy. She moved to New York in 1925 and was swept up in the Harlem Renaissance.
Her career reached its pinnacle with 1937’s “Their Eyes Were Watching God,” a swirling tale of a woman’s journey to independence that climaxes with the Everglades’ great 1928 Okeechobee hurricane.
Though she was in the Caribbean or New Orleans when the storm struck, she’d spent time in the ‘Glades and much of her narrative is based on actual accounts she collected after the disaster.
But fame didn’t always translate to fortune; Hurston never made even $1,000 on a single book. She once worked as a secretary to novelist Fanny Hurst. Two marriages failed. Peers accused her of Uncle Tomism after she became a political conservative, decrying integration.
Her last novel, ‘Seraph on the Suwannee,’ was published in 1948. Later, she was a maid, a substitute teacher and a columnist for the black weekly Fort Pierce Chronicle. She died broke in a Fort Pierce nursing home in 1960. Friends donated for her funeral.
In 1973, Alice Walker (‘The Color Purple’) paid for a marker for Hurston’s grave. Two years later, Walker wrote a magazine essay on Hurston’s life and work, and in 1978, Robert Hemenway, later chancellor of Kansas University, published her literary biography. Hurston’s posthumous comeback was off and running.
Eatonville’s Zora Neale Hurston National Museum of Fine Arts opened in 1990.
The Zora Neale Hurston Festival of the Arts and Humanities runs every January in the town, honoring the woman who prophesied: “When the consciousness we know as life ceases, I know that I shall still be part and parcel of the world.”
In 2018, Hurston was back on the bestseller list. “Barracoon,” a book she wrote in the 1930s about the last survivor of slavery’s brutal Middle Passage, was finally published to widespread acclaim, being cited as one of the best books of the year.
Eliot Kleinberg is a former staff writer for The Palm Beach Post and the author of numerous books about Florida and its history.
This article originally appeared on Palm Beach Post: From greatness to poverty and back for Florida’s Zora Neale Hurston
Reporting by Eliot Kleinberg, Special to the Palm Beach Post / Palm Beach Post
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