Before (and after) she became a novelist, Zora Neale Hurston studied anthropology and folklore, doing extensive fieldwork in both America and the Caribbean. In fact, it was on an anthropological research trip to Haiti, funded by a Guggenheim fellowship, when she wrote what would become her most famous and beloved work (and one of the greatest coming-of-age novels ever written), Their Eyes Were Watching God.
Hurston arrived in Haiti in late September—where according to her biographer Robert Hemenway “she perfected her Creole, acquired a working knowledge of voodoo gods, attended a number of ceremonies presided over by a voodoo priest,” and wrote into the night. When her manuscript was finished, she dated it December 19, 1936. “It was dammed up in me, and I wrote it under internal pressure in seven weeks,” Hurston wrote in her 1942 autobiography, Dust Tracks on a Road. “I wish that I could write it again. In fact, I regret all my books.” (Relatable.)
In 1937, the novel was published. Though it is now a classic of American literature, its immediate reception was rocky to say the least. Some of the earliest reviews were downright hostile, and many Black luminaries of the time, including Richard Wright, Ralph Ellison, and Alain Locke, criticized it for its refusal to conform to W. E. B. DuBois’s ideals of African American “uplift,” its disinterest in “indulging in resentment,” as Hurston herself put it, and also on account of its celebration of female sexuality. Wright accused it of containing “no theme, no message, no thought. In the main, her novel is not addressed to the Negro, but to a white audience whose chauvinistic tastes she knows how to satisfy.” After a brief flurry, both novel and author faded into the background—only to be rediscovered in the 1970s, the charge led by Alice Walker, whose 1975 essay “Looking for Zora” chronicles her search for Hurston’s unmarked grave.
“Hurston herself was refreshingly free of all the ideologies that currently obscure the reception of her best book,” wrote Harold Bloom in the introduction to a book of critical essays on the author.
Her sense of power has nothing in common with politics of any persuasion, with contemporary modes of feminism, or even with those questers who search for a black aesthetic. . . . [S]he was outrageous, heroically larger than life, witty in herself and the cause of wit in others. She belongs now to literary legend, which is as it should be. . . . With Whitman, Hurston herself is now an image of American literary vitality, and a part of the American mythology of exodus, of the power to choose the party of Eros, of more life.
Of course, since the revitalization of Hurston’s legacy, her reputation has only grown, and we’ve been treated to a steady stream of newly published work ever since—most recently her nonfiction work based on interviews with one of the last living survivors of the Middle Passage, Barracoon (2018), the story collection Hitting a Straight Lick with a Crooked Stick (2020), and a book of essays, You Don’t Know Us Negroes, which touches on “a panoply of topics, including politics, race and gender, and folkloric study from the height of the Harlem Renaissance to the early years of the Civil Rights movement,” and which came out just this year. A literary legend indeed.
