She joined a traveling theater company, and earned money by working as a maid in the homes of white people. Zora left Eatonville at age 14 for a rather itinerant life. She described it as a town where Black people could live and work as they pleased - a very different scenario from other parts of the South. Some of her later stories took place in towns that resembled Eatonville. Her father, a builder and preacher, remarried and she didn’t get along with her stepmother, causing a rift and forcing her to have to learn to fend for herself. Her mother, a teacher died when she was only 13, which was devastating. Growing up in this all-black, self-sufficient small town in central Florida had a lasting impact on Zora as she came of age. Zora’s parents moved to Eatonville, Florida in 1894, where her father became mayor. She pursued a dual career as a writer (producing fiction, plays, and essays) and as an anthropologist.īorn in Notasulga, Alabama, she was the fifth of eight children. With her determined intelligence and irrepressible personality, she quickly became a big name in the Harlem Renaissance movement of the 1920s. Her love of story would lead her not only to create her own, but to collect stories from the oral traditions of the African-American South and the Black cultures of the Caribbean.

Zora Neale Hurston (Janu– January 28, 1960), was an African-American novelist, memoirist, and ethnographer best known for Their Eyes Were Watching God, her 1937 novel.

Zora neale hurston eyes watching god