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Their Eyes Were Watching God By Zora Neale Hurston

203 Words1 Pages
Perhaps most widely known as a deeply talented Harlem Renaissance writer, Zora Neale Hurston also trained under Franz Boas as an anthropologist. Studying at Barnard in the 1920s, she was the only black student at the school, and in 1928, she became the first to graduate. When she pursued a graduate degree at Columbia, Boas encouraged her interest in African-American folklore. It was this research that informed her fiction, particularly her use of dialect and “folk speech” in works like “Their Eyes Were Watching God.” Hurston grew up in the town of Eatonville, Florida, an all-black community established in the wake of the Civil War, and she returned home to chronicle the folklore, sermons and music she’d grown up hearing. She didn’t stay stateside,
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