Zora Neale Hurston Their Eyes Were Watching God Analysis

Before Zora Neale Hurston was a novelist, which she became known for “Their Eyes Were Watching God,” she was a cultural anthropologist. She focused primarily on the life, labor, and culture of the black lower-class men and women who lived in the rural South. When studying, these black communities, Zora was much more than an observer–she was a participant. I chose Hurston because through her studies, she made black culture the center of conversation and she did it on her terms. Zora was the fifth of eight children of two former slaves, John and Lucy Ann Hurston. Born January 7, 1891, Zora was born in Notasulga, Alabama but as a child, her family moved to Eatonville, Florida an all-black town, which later became an inspiration in her writing

Encouraged by her peers, she left Howard and traveled to New York with nothing but a $1.25 in her pocket. In September, she enrolled into Barnard and followed her interest to study folklore, which led her to study with Franz Boas, the “Father of American Anthropology.” Boas became her mentor and helped to cultivate Zora’s intellectual development as she pursued anthropology. She continued to write fiction, and her anthropology studies began to influence her literature. Within one year, Zora published three short stories “Spunk,” “Muttsy,” and “Sweat.” Through these publications, she had the opportunity to collaborate with notable Harlem Renaissance writers like Langston Hughes and Wallace Thurman. She was the first black to graduate from Barnard in 1928 and married her past boyfriend, Herbert Sheen, but the marriage did not last. She instead went to work with Frank Boas at Colombia University’s anthropology department as a field researcher on a fellowship from the Association of Negro Life and History. She returned to her hometown, Eatonville, Florida to collect African-American folktales as her first big assignment in her field research. Her first try was not successful as she had changed so much from last time she had been in Eatonville. However, Hurston tried again with a better perspective of embedding herself within the community; she was

Her literature was her way of recording everyday black life and creating a medium that could that reach and influence America from coast to coast. She wanted to spread her message that black people were able to “think, and think about something other than the race problem. That they are very human and internally, according to [the] natural endowment, are just like everybody else” (What White Publishers Won't Print). We can learn from Hurston because she stood for what she believed in even if that meant standing up to her peers or even her community. Many criticisms claimed her work was missing the suffering, pain, or the harsh reality of the African-American struggle. Hurston was beyond her time because she didn’t have to write about the bitterness; she was uncovering the other unexplored parts of black