How many novels did hurston wrote

July 7, Divorces Sheen. September Writes for a theatrical revue called Fast and Furious. January Writes and stages a theatrical revue called The Great Day , first performed on January 10 on Broadway at the John Golden Theatre; works with the creative literature department of Rollins College, Winter Park, Florida, to produce a concert program of Negro music.

January Begins to study for a Ph. D in anthropology at Columbia University on a fellowship from the Rosenwald Foundation. April - September In Jamaica. May Returns to Haiti on a renewed Guggenheim. November Moses, Man of the Mountain published. February Files for divorce from Price, though the two are reconciled briefly.

Summer Makes a folklore-collecting trip to South Carolina. October January Works as a story consultant at Paramount Pictures. November Dust Tracks on a Road published. November Divorce from Price granted. Doctor ; it is rejected by Lippincott. October Seraph on the Suwanee published.

Winter - Moves to Belle Glade, Florida. Early Suffers a stroke. October Forced to enter the St. The once-famous writer and folklorist died poor and alone on January 28, , and was buried in an unmarked grave in Fort Pierce, Florida. More than a decade after her death, another great talent helped to revive interest in Hurston and her work: Alice Walker wrote about Hurston in the essay "In Search of Zora Neale Hurston," published in Ms.

Walker's essay helped introduce Hurston to a new generation of readers and encouraged publishers to print new editions of Hurston's long-out-of-print novels and other writings. Robert Hemenway's acclaimed biography, Zora Neale Hurston , continued the renewal of interest in the forgotten literary great. Today, her legacy endures through such efforts as the annual Zora!

Festival in her old hometown of Eatonville. The book is based on her interviews from the s with Oluale Kossola, who's enslaved name was Cudjo Lewis, the last living survivor of the Middle Passage. Prior to being published, the manuscript was in the Howard University library archives. We strive for accuracy and fairness. If you see something that doesn't look right, contact us! Subscribe to the Biography newsletter to receive stories about the people who shaped our world and the stories that shaped their lives.

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Both her biographer, Robert E. Hurston was a woman used to getting away with things: her second marriage license lists her date of birth as Still, the ruse stemmed not from ordinary feminine vanity but from her desire for an education and her shame at how long it took her to get it. The lie apparently began when she entered high school, in , at twenty-six. She had been very young when the family moved to Eatonville, Florida, the first incorporated black town in America by there would be some thirty of them throughout the South , in search of the jobs and the relief from racism that such a place promised.

In many ways, they found precisely what they wanted: John Hurston became a preacher at the Zion Hope Baptist Church and served three terms as mayor. Working at every kind of job—maid, waitress, manicurist—she managed to finish high school by June, , and went on to Howard University, where she published her first story, in the literary-club magazine, in The first date that Hurston offers in the story of her life is January, , when she arrived in New York City with no job, no friends, and a dollar and fifty cents in her pocket—a somewhat melodramatic account meant to lower the lights behind her rising glory.

This was the new, public Zora, all bravado and laughter, happily startling her audience with the truth of its own preoccupations. Her new boss once tried to pass her off in a segregated restaurant as an African princess. For her, though, it was experience: it was not washing floors, it was going somewhere. In the fall of , this ever-masquerading, newly glamorous Scott-within-Zelda of Lenox Avenue enrolled in school again—she had completed less than two years at Howard, and had finagled a scholarship out of Meyer—and discovered anthropology.

Believing that culture and learning have as much influence on human development as heredity, he set out to prove how close the members of the family of man might really be. Probably no one except her mother influenced Hurston more. Du Bois, and Hurston was similarly inspired by the sense of importance that Boas gave to Southern black culture, not just as a source of entertaining stories but as the transmitted legacy of Africa—and as an independent cultural achievement, in need of preservation and study.

It seems safe to say that no black woman in America was ever simply allotted such strengths, no matter how strong she was or how uniformly black her home town. They had to be won, and every victory was precarious.

If the peculiarities of a segregated childhood spared her the harshest brunt of white racism, the crippling consciousness of color in the black community and in the black soul was a subject she knew well and could not leave alone. It was precisely because of that scarcity that she took hold of racism not at its source but as it reverberated through the black community. She had to walk back, and was invariably punished for her boldness. The book has since been reviled by the very people who rescued her fiction from oblivion, and for the same reason that the fiction was once consigned there: a sense that she was putting on a song and dance for whites.

Having been infected by a rabid dog, he lost his senses and came at her with a gun. The black folks who knew the couple have sided against her at the trial, hoping to see her hanged. Does this reflect honest human complexity or racial confusion? In what world, if any, was Hurston ever at home? When Hurston returned to New York, she and Boas agreed that a white person could have discovered as much. So she learned, in effect, to pass for black.

In the fall of , in need of a patron, she offered her services to Mrs. Osgood Mason, a wealthy white widow bent on saving Western culture from rigor mortis through her support of Negro artistic primitivism. For more than three years, Mrs. Mason paid for Hurston to make forays to the South to collect Negro folk material. The fruits of her field work appeared in various forms throughout the early thirties: stories, plays, musical revues, academic articles. By this time, however, Hurston had won enough recognition to go off on a Guggenheim grant to study voodoo practices in the Caribbean.

It was not a happy trip. In her autobiography, Hurston quickly dismisses her first marriage and entirely neglects to mention her second; each lasted only a matter of months. She wed her longtime Howard University boyfriend in May, , and bailed out that August.

Apparently unruffled, Hurston wrote her friends that her husband had been an obstacle, and had held her back. In , her marriage to a twenty-three-year-old W.

It is true that Hurston was never financially supported by a man—or by anyone except Mrs. Without doubt, Hurston was a woman of strong character, and she went through life mostly alone. She burned sorrow and fear like fuel, to keep herself going. Other needs were just as unwelcome. There is little insouciance in the way Hurston writes of the man she calls P. He stood on his own feet so firmly that he reared back. It is hard to know whether his youth or his resentment or his perfection was the central problem.

Her diligent biographer, who located the man decades later, reports that he had never known exactly what had happened.