On August 27, 1903, Zora Neale Hurston was born in Notasulga, Alabama, and raised in Eatonville, Florida, the first incorporated Black town in the United States. She studied at Howard University, won a scholarship to Barnard College, studied under Franz Boas at Columbia, and became both a trained anthropologist and one of the most important novelists of the Harlem Renaissance.

Their Eyes Were Watching God was published in 1937. It was written in seven weeks, during a field research trip to Haiti. It is narrated in the vernacular of Black Southern speech — not as a stylistic choice for effect but as the accurate record of how people talked, which Hurston knew from her fieldwork collecting folklore in Florida, Alabama, and Haiti. The novel follows Janie Crawford through three marriages and her own gradual self-definition.

Richard Wright, in a review, criticized it for producing a minstrel image of Negro life for white audiences. Alain Locke, another Harlem Renaissance heavyweight, dismissed it as a novel without a social theme. Hurston had written about interiority, desire, community, grief — not about the fact of white racism. The critical establishment of the Harlem Renaissance, which was largely male, had decided that the proper subject for Black literature was the relationship between Black people and white oppression. Hurston had written about Black people in relation to each other.

Her anthropological work — Mules and Men (1935), Tell My Horse (1938) — documented African American and Caribbean folklore and spiritual practices with the precision of a trained fieldworker and the literary attention of a novelist. Boas wrote the foreword to Mules and Men. The academic establishment did not quite know what to do with her.

She died in poverty in 1960 in Saint Lucie County, Florida, in a welfare home. She was buried in an unmarked grave. Alice Walker found the grave in 1973 and had a marker installed. Walker's essay "In Search of Zora Neale Hurston," published in 1975, initiated the reassessment that made Hurston a central figure in the American canon.