- Zora Neale Hurston was a talented and prolific writer and a skilled anthropologist from the Harlem (New York) Renaissance to the Civil Rights Era.
- Born on January 7, 1891 in Notasulga, Alabama, she grew up in the all-black town of Eatonville, Florida.
- After her mother’s death when Zora was14, she worked as a maid until she could move and settle in Baltimore, Maryland.
- When she was 26 years old and still hadn't finished high school. Needing to present herself as a teenager to qualify for free public schooling, she lopped 10 years off her life--giving her age as 16 and the year of her birth as 1901.
- Zora Neal Hurston completed her education at Morgan Academy and Howard University.
- Zora’s short story, “John Redding Goes to Sea” was published in Howard’s literary magazine Stylus in 1921.
- In September 1925 Hurston entered Barnard College, where she studied anthropology with the distinguished scholar Franz Boas. She received her B.A. in 1928.
- Hurston was known for her quick wit which enabled her to befriend other well-known contributors in the Harlem Renaissance of the 1920s, poet Langston Hughes and popular singer/actress Ethel Waters.
- Zora collaborated with Langston Hughes and Wallace Thurman to edit the short-lived magazine Fire!
- Collaborating with Langston Hughes, in 1930 she wrote her first play titled Mule Bone, a comedy about African American rural folk life.
- Jonah’s Gourd Vine was loosely based on the life of her father, a rural minister. This was Hurston’s first published novel.
- In 1935 she authored Mules and Men, a volume of anthropological folklore.
- Hurston’s most famous work, Their Eyes Were Watching God, was published in 1937 followed by Moses, Man of the Mountain in 1939, and Seraph on the Suwanee, the least successful of her works, in 1948.
- Her autobiography, Dust Tracks on a Road, appeared in 1942. That year, she was profiled in Who's Who in America, Current Biography and Twentieth Century Authors.
- Hurston’s final years were marked by poverty, difficulty with writing, and estrangement from her family. Though ill, she remained independent until the end. Zora Neale Hurston died in obscurity. Her neighbors in Fort Pierce, Florida, had to take up a collection for her funeral. The collection didn't yield enough to pay for a headstone and was buried in an unmarked grave in January 1960.
- Alice Walker, the author of “The Color Purple”, traveled to Fort Pierce to place a marker on the grave of the author who had so inspired her own work. Walker chose a plain gray headstone. Borrowing from a Jean Toomer poem, she dressed the marker up with a fitting epitaph: "Zora Neale Hurston: A Genius of the South."