On September 17, 1891, Zora Neale Hurston was born in Notasulga, Alabama — or possibly in Eatonville, Florida, where she grew up. She altered the year throughout her life, sometimes claiming 1901, and declined to be pinned down about it. "I have been in Sorrow's kitchen," she wrote, "and licked out all the pots."

Hurston arrived in New York in 1925 with $1.50 in cash and a suitcase. She enrolled at Barnard College, became the first Black student to graduate from it, and studied anthropology under Franz Boas at Columbia while simultaneously publishing fiction and participating in the Harlem Renaissance. By the late 1920s she was both a doctoral anthropologist conducting fieldwork in the American South and the Caribbean and the most distinctive literary voice to emerge from the Harlem Renaissance — which was a considerable distinction in a movement that included Langston Hughes, Claude McKay, and Jean Toomer.

Their Eyes Were Watching God, published in 1937, was written in seven weeks in Haiti during a Guggenheim Fellowship. It was not well received by the Black male intellectuals of the Harlem Renaissance. Richard Wright wrote that it "carries no theme, no message, no thought." Hughes was dismissive. The book fell out of print.

She returned to Florida and worked as a librarian, domestic worker, and part-time journalist. She lived in poverty through the 1950s and died in 1960 in a welfare home in Fort Pierce, Florida. She was buried in an unmarked grave.

Alice Walker, researching a 1975 essay, located the unmarked grave and had it marked.