AMERICAN

ZORA NEALE HURSTON
Photo © Carl Van Vechten,
courtesy Yale University
Zora Neale Hurston
(1903-1960)
Born in the small town of
Eatonville, Florida, Zora Neale
Hurston is known as one of the
lights of the Harlem Renaissance.
She first came to New York City at
the age of 16 — having arrived as
part of a traveling theatrical troupe.
A strikingly gifted storyteller who
captivated her listeners, she attended
Barnard College, where she
studied with anthropologist Franz
Boaz and came to grasp ethnicity
from a scientific perspective. Boaz
urged her to collect folklore from
her native Florida environment,
which she did. The distinguished
folklorist Alan Lomax called her
Mules and Men (1935) “the most
engaging, genuine, and skillfully
written book in the field of
folklore.”
Hurston also spent time in Haiti,
studying voodoo and collecting Caribbean
folklore that was anthologized
in Tell My Horse (1938). Her
natural command of colloquial English
puts her in the great tradition
of Mark Twain. Her writing sparkles
with colorful language and comic
— or tragic — stories from the
African-American oral tradition.
Hurston was an impressive novelist.
Her most important work,
Their Eyes Were Watching God
(1937), is a moving, fresh depiction
of a beautiful mulatto woman’s
maturation and renewed happiness
as she moves through three marriages.
The novel vividly evokes the
lives of African-Americans working
the land in the rural South. A harbinger
of the women’s movement,
Hurston inspired and influenced
such contemporary writers as Alice
Walker and Toni Morrison through
books such as her autobiography,
Dust Tracks on a Road (1942).
LITERARY CURRENTS: THE
FUGITIVES
AND NEW CRITICISM
From the Civil War into the
20th century, the southern
United States had remained a
political and economic backwater
ridden with racism and superstition,
but, at the same time, blessed
with rich folkways and a strong
sense of pride and tradition. It had
a somewhat unfair reputation for
being a cultural desert of provincialism
and ignorance.
Ironically, the most significant
20th-century regional literary
movement was that of the Fugitives
— led by poet-critic-theoretician
John Crowe Ransom, poet Allen
Tate, and novelist-poet-essayist
Robert Penn Warren. This southern
literary school rejected “northern”
urban, commercial values, which
they felt had taken over America.
The Fugitives called for a return to
the land and to American traditions
that could be found in the South.
The movement took its name from
a literary magazine, The Fugitive,
published from 1922 to 1925 at
Vanderbilt University in Nashville,
Tennessee, and with which Ransom,
Tate, and Warren were all
associated.
These three major Fugitive writers
were also associated with New
76