Li Stephanie - Zora Neale Hurston: A Life in American History

Zora Neale Hurston

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Zora Neale Hurston

A LIFE IN AMERICAN HISTORY

Stephanie Li

Copyright 2020 by Stephanie Li

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, except for the inclusion of brief quotations in a review, without prior permission in writing from the publisher.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Li, Stephanie, 1977

Title: Zora Neale Hurston : a life in American history / Stephanie Li.

Description: Santa Barbara : ABC-CLIO, 2020. | Series: Black history lives | Includes bibliographical references and index.

Identifiers: LCCN 2019040841 (print) | LCCN 2019040842 (ebook) | ISBN 9781440866548 (print) | ISBN 9781440866555 (ebook)

Subjects: LCSH: Hurston, Zora Neale. | Authors, American20th centuryBiography. | African American women authors20th centuryBiography. | FolkloristsUnited StatesBiography. | Novelists, American20th centuryBiography. | African American novelists20th centuryBiography. | Hurston, Zora NealeCriticism and interpretation.

Classification: LCC PS3515.U789 Z76325 2020 (print) | LCC PS3515.U789 (ebook) | DDC 813/.52dc23

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019040841

LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019040842

ISBN: 978-1-4408-6654-8 (print)

978-1-4408-6655-5 (ebook)

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This book is also available as an eBook.

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This book is printed on acid-free paper

Manufactured in the United States of America

Contents

CHAPTER 1
Origins and Childhood

CHAPTER 2
Exile and Instability

CHAPTER 3
EducationHoward and Harlem

CHAPTER 4
The Young Anthropologist

CHAPTER 5
Mule Bone

CHAPTER 6
Independence and Jonahs Gourd Vine

CHAPTER 7
Jamaica, Haiti, and Their Eyes Were Watching God

CHAPTER 8
Wanderings and Fame

CHAPTER 9
Nightmare and Recovery

CHAPTER 10
The Final Years

The Black History Lives biography series explores and examines the lives of the most iconic figures in African American history, with supplementary material that highlights the subjects significance in our contemporary world. Volumes in this series offer far more than a simple retelling of a subjects life by providing readers with a greater understanding of the outside events and influences that shaped each subjects world, from familial relationships to political and cultural developments.

Each volume includes chronological chapters that detail events of the subjects life. The final chapter explores the cultural and historical significance of the individual and places their actions and beliefs within an overall historical context. Books in the series highlight important information about the individual through sidebars that connect readers to the larger context of social, political, intellectual, and pop culture in American history; a timeline listing significant events; and a comprehensive bibliography for further research.

The purpose of this book is to introduce students and general readers to the life, work, and genius of Zora Neale Hurston. Despite Hurston being one of the most important writers of the twentieth century, there are few comprehensive biographies of her life. The most thorough of these, Robert Hemenways Zora Neale Hurston: A Literary Biography (1977) and Valerie Boyds Wrapped in Rainbows: The Life of Zora Neale Hurston (2003), are written for an audience already familiar with Hurstons signal achievements. By contrast, this biography does not assume any prior knowledge of Hurston or her writings but instead welcomes readers who have little understanding of Hurstons place in the American literary canon. My hope is that this volume will serve as a point of departure for future study of Hurstons work.

This biography is indebted to Hemenway and Boyds extensive research and consideration of Hurstons life. It also relies heavily on Carla Kaplans Zora Neale Hurston: A Life in Letters (2003). This collection, while not comprehensive, is the best source for understanding Hurstons playful, often changeable self and the concerns most dear to her heart. As with all of Hurstons work, these letters require readers to be sensitive to the ways in which she performs for an audience. However, taken together, they capture the range of her desires, interests, and political commitments.

Ultimately, however, the principal source for this biography is Hurstons own published work: her novels, short stories, essays, anthropological studies, plays, and journalistic pieces. As the recently published Barracoon: The Story of the Last Black Cargo (2018) demonstrates, we are still catching up with the totality of Hurstons writings and the range of her interests. Collections such as Go Gator and Muddy the Water: Writings by Zora Neale Hurston from the Federal Writers Project (1999), Mule Bone: A Comedy of Negro Life by Langston Hughes and Zora Neale Hurston (1991), and The Complete Stories (1995) have helped make Hurstons less famous work more accessible to a broad audience. However, many key pieces, including her journalistic essays and later political articles, have yet to be published in book form. My hope is that increased interest in Hurstons work will encourage the publication of her complete writings.

Finally, I owe a special thanks to Sandra Carpenter and Beth Bevis for their research assistance. I am also grateful for ABC-CLIO and Kim Kennedy-White for providing me with the opportunity to write this biography.

During her lifetime, Zora Neale Hurston gave at least three different dates for the day she was born. Her first biographer, Robert E. Hemenway, stated that she was probably born in 1901 in Eatonville, Florida. In fact, she was born ten years earlier, on January 7, 1891, and over four hundred miles away in Notasulga, Alabama. Hurston lied for a variety of reasons about her age. When she was in her twenties, she posed as a teenager hoping to complete her high school education. Later, she slashed a decade off her age in order to act as a young ingnue eager for the guidance and patronage of wealthy mentors in 1920s Harlem. From the very start of her life, Hurston mixed fact and fantasy, myth and history to create a truth that is less concerned with accuracy than with her own desires and belief in self-creation. There are fewer biographies of Hurston than would be expected of a writer of her stature, but unlike such male counterparts as Richard Wright and James Baldwin, she presents unique challenges to delineating a factual representation of her life. With Hurston, there are truths in her lies and fantasies in her history. Teasing these apart reveals the complexities of a creative trickster who fashioned art out of her life. A literary genius and an anthropological visionary, Hurston remains one of the most fascinating figures in American letters because she refuses to be contained by simplistic definitions. A feminist who never seems to have used the word, a black writer who at times both essentialized and spurned race, Hurston seems to multiply the closer we look, inhabiting and performing various selves that reflect a transcendent artistic vision.