Zora Neale HurstonEssay title: Zora Neale HurstonZora Neale HurstonOn March 21, 1924, the National Urban League, spearheaded by Charles Johnson, held a dinner to introduce new literary talent to New York City’s black community. This dinner party resulted in the Survey Graphic, a magazine whose attention was upon social and cultural pluralism, to publish a special Harlem edition, which would feature the works of Harlem’s black writers and was to be edited by Alain Locke. Locke, a literary scholar, black philosopher, professor and authority on black culture, later expanded the Harlem special edition of the Survey Graphic into and anthology he titled The New Negro. Soon, the very cultural movement Survey Graphic hoped to shine light upon would be recognized as the New Negro Movement but later this movement later grew to be known as the Harlem Renaissance (wikipedia). From this cultural movement, an identity would grow. Represented in the writing and the ideas disseminating from Harlem at the time, the Harlem Renaissance has grown to represent a period of unparalleled progressive thought as well as the introduction of black ideas and art into American culture. No longer were Black writers imitating a white style of writing. An expression of black culture represented an equality and a pride in a race that for hundreds of years was supposedly second-class. This movement spawned the some of the most acclaimed African-American authors to date such as Langston Hughes, Wallace Thurman as well as Zora Neale Hurston; one of the most infamous and revolutionary authors the Harlem Renaissance would produce.
Understanding the ideals and themes of Zora Neale Hurston comes with an understanding of the upbringing and childhood she had. Born on the seventh of January 1981 in Notasluga, Alabama, Zora Neale Huston was the fifth of eight children by John Hurston and Lucy Ann Potts. John Hurston was a sharecropper, carpenter and Baptist preacher while Hurston’s mother, Lucy Ann Potts, was a schoolteacher. At the age of three John Hurston moved the family to Eatonville, where he would become mayor of the small town of 125. Eatonville was like no other town in the United States during the last years of the Nineteenth century (Hemenway). In 1863, Eatonville was one of the first all black towns to be chartered after the emancipation proclamation and in 1887 was the first of these towns to be incorporated. Her childhood here shaped her ideas and reality and, as would later be seen in her writing, would shape her views on race. The wonderful life in utopian Eatonville was lost after the death of her mother in 1904, which led the young Zora Neale Hurston away from the halls of academics and into domestics. Her father quickly remarried a woman that Hurston did not like and had left the household at age 14, first caring after her brother’s children and later as a domestic servant in Baltimore. It was here in Baltimore where Hurston reentered academia, enrolling in the Morgan Academy, a High School operated by what is now Morgan State University. Upon graduation, Hurston enrolled at Howard University in Washington where Hurston’s life would forever be changed. It was at Howard University in 1918 where she met a young Alain Locke who further inspired her strong pride in black heritage and also inspired her to pursue a literary career.
In 1921, Hurston published her first short story, “John Redding Goes to Sea”, in the Howard University literary magazine The Stylus, in which John Redding struggles to suppress his desire for the “open road, rolling seas, for peoples and countries I have never seen”. It was after this foreboding short story, in 1925, when Zora Neale Hurston arrived in Harlem, just as the Harlem Renaissance was becoming the cultural movement studied today. Hurston enrolled in Barnard College, the all woman affiliate of Columbia University after being awarded a scholarship (Hemenway). She arrived as the foundation for the Harlem Renaissance was hardening. Intellectuals such as WEB Dubois, leaders such as Claude McKay and authors such as Wallace Thurman and Langston Hughes had already arrived in New York. The stage was set for Cultural Revolution.
In 1925, Hurston makes her first literary ripples with the publication of her short story Spunk in both Opportunity and The New Negro anthology edited by Hurston’s friends from Howard, Alain Locke. The story is one of hubris and pride as the title character, Spunk Banks, is presumably killed by the spirit of Joe Kanty after Joe Kanty tried to enact revenge upon Spunk for sleeping with Joe’s wife, Lena. The story marks Hurston’s understanding of Southern dialect and culture. The story is riddled with folklore with roots in her native Eatonville and it’s all black culture. After the publication of Spunk, Hurston’s short stories began to be published with greater frequency. During this stretch her story Sweat was published in the
Courier Monthly, the latter of which had a book-keeping system in which only black children came to publish the stories in a standard issue for a few months a year. The short stories in this format received a more favorable review because they have the characters that would follow in a black literary romance in the 1920s.
In 1932, Hurston also published the book Black Folk Stories and Black Poets of the 1920s and 1930s, with her daughter Emily, born by that book. She also published her novel, Spunk’s Little Sister, after the publication of Spunk, in the New Negro anthology edited by Hurston and published in 1928 by Bloomsbury Books. After the publication of Spunk, Hurston and Emily have both started writing a series of short story collections. Hurston now writes a daily paper and, from September to February, is on assignment for the Alabama Journal, a major magazine in the South that publishes a handful of independent books. In 1931 she and Hurston were scheduled to appear at an American Association of Southern Literary Writers dinner in Birmingham.
Hurston’s writing is an all black collection, not to be confused with that of Mrs. John B. Roper.
The collection of stories includes the novels of Charles P. Kottke (1901-1984), and the short stories of Walter B. Roper (1930-1965). Roper recounts his adventures in a number of African-American family histories which his daughter Emily and the three children of a slave-owning family found in her home. The stories are often told outside the family household but have a much more intimate story feel.
The collection of stories includes the novels of Walter B. Roper and Joseph A. Dargan (1931-1975), which were published as a combination of three short stories each for a year, in 1931 and 1939. The stories are arranged in such a way that, when the story progresses, you will be introduced to the characters and their attitudes. By taking the reader through each chapter in each installment, you can follow the plot as it relates to the characters and their family and get inside the heart of each individual.
The short stories in this collection are written by Charles P. Kottke, an academic who went on to become one of the most prominent writers of the twentieth century in the work of the Southern Literary Association. By being an accomplished New Negro, Kottke has been credited with being one of the first black literary gurus and the father of literary theory.
In 1926, Hurston published the first story collection of its kind, in The Narrative of the Narrative and the