Zora Neale Hurston

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Literary career

The Harlem Renaissance was at its peak when Hurston arrived in New York City in 1925, and she soon became one of the city's most popular writers. Hurston's short story "Spunk" was selected for The New Negro, a landmark anthology of fiction, poetry, and essays focusing on African and African-American art and literature just short of her arrival in Barnard. A group of young black writers, including Hurston, Langston Hughes, and Wallace Thurman, coined the Niggerati, published Fire!! in 1926. Many of the Harlem Renaissance's young artists and writers were represented in the film.

Hurston came from the Deep South in 1927 to gather African-American folk tales. Cudjoe Lewis, of Africatown, Alabama, was also interviewed by this author, who was the last known survivor of the slave trade in the Transatlantic slave trade when she entered the country in 1860 and was therefore the last known survivor of the enslaved Africans enslaved African slave trade. "Cudjoe's Own Story of the Last African Slaver" was published in the next year (1928). Emma Langdon Roche's piece was largely plagiarized by Robert E. Hemenway, an Alabama writer who wrote about Lewis in a 1914 book, according to her biographer Robert E. Hemenway. Hurston did include new details about daily life in Bantè, Lewis' home village.

Hurston planned to publish a collection of hundreds of folk tales from her field research in the South. She wanted to see them as close to the original as possible, but she had trouble balancing Franz Boas' academic advisor's and her patron, Charlotte Osgood Mason. This book was not available at the time. A copy was later discovered at the Smithsonian archives among the papers of anthropologist William Duncan Strong, a friend of Boas. Every Tongue Got to Confess, Hurston's Negro Folk-tales from the Gulf States were released posthumously in 2001.

Hurston returned to Alabama in 1928 with more funds; she held more interviews with Lewis, took photos of him and others in the neighborhood, and caught the only known footage of him – an African who was enslaved to the United States through the slave trade. Barracoon was a book based on this information, and she published it in 1931. "It's a highly dramatic, semifictionalized story aimed at the young reader," Hemenway described it as "a highly detailed, semifictionalized story aimed at the popular reader." It has also been described as a "testimonial text" more in the style of other anthropological studies since the late twentieth century.

Hurston's literary patron, philanthropist Charlotte Osgood Mason, learned of Lewis and began to give him money for his care after this round of interviews. Journalists from local and national newspapers also interviewed Lewis. Barracoon, Hurston's manuscript, was eventually published posthumously on May 8, 2018. Captive Africans were temporarily detained in jail before being shipped to another country in "barracoon," or barracks in Spanish.

Hurston published Mules and Men in 1929. It was first published in 1935.

Hurston had written several short stories and the critically acclaimed Mules and Men (1935), a pioneering work of "literary anthropology" in North Florida documenting African-American folklore from timber camps. Mule Bone: A Comedy of Negro Life, a performance that they never staged, she collaborated with Langston Hughes on Mule Bone: A Comedy of Negro Life in 1930. Their friendship fell apart as a result of their union. In 1991, the performance was first performed.

Hurston adapted her anthropological study for the performing arts. The Great Day, her folk revue, debuted in 1932 at the John Golden Theatre in New York, and her authentic African song and dance were on display. Despite positive feedback, the product had only one success. Hurston was left $600 in debt on his debut. No producers wanted to go forward with a complete run of the show.

Zora Neale Hurston produced two other musical revues during the 1930s, From Sun to Sun, which was a reissue of The Great Day's, and Singing Steel. Hurston had a strong belief that folklore should be dramatized.

Hurston's first three books were published in the 1930s: Their Eyes Were Watching God (1937), written during her fieldwork in Haiti and considered her masterwork; and Moses, Man of the Mountain (1939).

Hurston was given a Guggenheim Fellowship in 1937 to conduct ethnographic studies in Jamaica and Haiti. Tell My Horse (1938) is a feminist magazine published in Jamaica, as well as Haiti's vodoun.

Hurston's work appeared in such periodicals as The American Mercury and The Saturday Evening Post in the 1940s. Seraph on the Suwanee, her last published book, was notable principally for its emphasis on white characters. It looks at snapshots of "white garbage" women. Hurston's reflection on birth, waste, and the establishment of class and gender identities among poor whites, according to Jackson (2000), echoes the 1920s eugenics discourses.

The Pittsburgh Courier had assigned Hurston to cover Ruby McCollum's wealthy black wife of the local bolita racketeer, who had murdered a racial white doctor. She also contributed to Ruby McCollum: Woman in the Suwannee Jail (1956), a book by journalist and civil rights activist William Bradford Huie.

Every Tongue Got to Confess (2001), a collection of folktales collected in the 1920s, was released in Smithsonian archives posthumously.

The Library of America selected excerpts from Ruby McCollum's Woman in the Suwannee Jail (1956), to which Hurston had contributed, in its two-century retrospective of American true crime writing.

Barracoon, Hurston's nonfiction book, was released in 2018. A barracoon is a kind of barracks in which slaves were held before being transported to another country.

She states:

However, her spirituality is a lot more complicated than simple atheism, despite explicitly rejecting her preacher father's Baptist faith. She investigates voodoo, going so far as to participate in such ceremonies, and then shares her admiration for Biblical characters such as King David: "He was a man after God's own heart and was very helpful in assisting God in getting rid of the no-count rascals who were clogging up the place."

Hurston's work has been buried for decades, both historical and political reasons. The usage of African-American dialect, which was featured in Hurston's books, became less popular. Given the racially charged tradition of dialect fiction in American literature, younger writers felt that using such dialect was demeaning. In addition, Hurston had made stylistic choices in dialogue influenced by her academic research. Hurston tried to represent speech patterns of the period, which she had uncovered through ethnographic study, as a folklorist.

Many of Hurston's literary contemporaries slammed dialect, saying that it was an African-American identity and was embedded in a post-Civil War, white nationalism tradition. These writers, who were part of the Harlem Renaissance, sluggishly dismissed Hurston's later work as not moving the movement. Were Watching God's review by Richard Wright: They Eyes Were Watching God.

However, Hurston has seen a revival of interest in the late twentieth century. Critics have since lauded her linguistic skill.

Richard Wright, a young Communist, was the pre-eminent African-American author during the 1930s and 1940s when her book was published. Unlike Hurston, Wright wrote in specifically political terms. He had become dissatisfied with Communism, but he used the struggle of African Americans for respect and economic development as both the source and the catalyst for his work. Other well-known African-American writers of the time, such as Ralph Ellison, shared the same fears as Wright, but in ways that were not influenced by Modernism.

Hurston, who elicited conservative views at times, was on the other side of the controversy over the promise of leftist politics for African-Americans. For example, Hurston argued that the New Deal's economic assistance had created a detrimental dependency among African Americans on the government, and that this dependency ceded too much power to politicians.

She wrote in a 1957 letter:

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