Hurston's family moved to Eastonville, Florida, an all-black community, when she was three years old.Hurston didn't graduate from high school until she was 26 due to a long delay in beginning her education. She then attended Howard University, where she founded the school newspaper and received an associate degree in 1920. She continued studying intermittently at Howard and began to publish some poetry and short stories. In 1924, she moved to New York City where she met the members of the Harlem Renaissance, Langston Hughes, Countee Cullen and others. She began working for Fannie Hurst as a secretary. Later, in 1926, Annie Nathan Meyer, another of the Harlem Renaissance, secured a scholarship for Hurston at Barnard College, Where she studied anthropology. Hurston was interested in becoming a social scientist and, with her professor's help, she obtained a research fellowship from the Association for the Study of Negro Life and History. She returned to Florida and traveled throughout the South gathering information and in 1931, published Hoodoo in America in the Journal of American Folklore and followed in 1935 with the highly acclaimed Mules and Men. She spent more than a year in Haiti and Jamaica on a Guggenheim Fellowship, continuing her research, later using the material gathered in her book Tell My Horse (1938). Hurston was a regular contributor to The American Mercury and the Saturday Evening Post during the 1940s, but by late 1948, her popularity began to wane. Her continued use of dialect in much of her writing led to literary decline and for decades her work was ignored. Today it has experienced a much-needed revival. Her other works include Color Struck (1925), Jonah's Gourd Vine (1934), Their Eyes Were Watching God (1937), Moses, Man of the Mountain (1939), Seraph on the Suwanee (1948) and What White Publishers Won't Print (1950). |
