Mama exhorted her children at every opportunity to ‘jump at the sun.’ We might not land on the sun, but at least we would get off the ground
Zora Neale Hurston
Zora Neale Hurston had an interest in African American and Caribbean folklore and did anthropological and ethnographic research. An important figure of the Harlem Renaissance, she wrote about African American experience in essays, short stories, and fiction. Her masterwork, Their Eyes Were Watching God was published in 1937. She was one of the most significant black woman writers of the first half of the twentieth Century.
Her compensation was not equivalent to her influence, and when she died in 1960 at age 69 her neighbors in Ft. Pierce, Florida took up a collection for her funeral. Her grave went unmarked until Alice Walker commissioned a headstone to be placed there in 1973.
1891-1960, USA
Selected resources
- Hurston, “Their Eyes Were Watching God”, 1937
- Hurston, “Dust Tracks on a Road: An Autobiography by Zora Neale Hurston”, 1942
- https://www.womenshistory.org/education-resources/biographies/zora-hurston