LYCOS RETRIEVER 
Zora Neale Hurston
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From Darwin Turner's early and scathing criticisms of her work to Hemenway's balanced praise and Alice Walker's enthusiasm, Zora Neale Hurston has been the subject of intense critical attention since her "re-discovery" in the late 'sixties. The most prolific African-American woman writer of her time or earlier, the power of her imagery and the richness of the culture which she brings to life through her writings have found her enthusiastic new audiences in recent years. Hurston herself was unable to make a living from her writings and worked as a teacher, a librarian and a domestic in order to earn her livelihood. She spent her later years in Florida, continuing to write articles which were published in various local and national venues and three additional novels which were rejected for publication. Her death in 1960 in a welfare home went largely unnoticed by the world and she was buried in an unmarked grave. In 1973, during a time when Hurston's eminence was finally being recognized, Alice Walker placed a marker in the field where Hurston lay.
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At the height of the Harlem Renaissance during the 1930s, Zora Neale Hurston was the preeminent black woman writer in the United States. She was a sometime-collaborator with Langston Hughes and a fierce rival of Richard Wright. Her stories appeared in major magazines, she consulted on Hollywood screenplays, and she penned four novels, an autobiography, countless essays, and two books on black mythology. Yet by the late 1950s, Hurston was living in obscurity, working as a maid in a Florida hotel. She died in 1960 in a Welfare home, was buried in an unmarked grave, and quickly faded from literary consciousness until 1975 when Alice Walker almost single-handedly revived interest in her work.
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As in the previous folktale, many tales in Zora Neale Hurston’s Mules and Men have moral lessons in which virtues are rewarded. There is the tale of the cat who eats nine fish. These fish were the only food of a starving family. The family dies of starvation. The cat dies because he ate too much. When the cat gets to heaven, God is so angry with the cat that he throws him out of heaven.
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After Zora Neale Hurston died on January 28, 1960 in a Fort Pierce, Florida, hospital, her papers were ordered to be burned. A law officer and friend, Patrick DuVal, passing by the house where she had lived, stopped and put out the fire... saving an invaluable collection of literary documents for posterity. The nucleus of this collection was given to the University of Florida libraries in 1961 by Mrs. Marjorie Silver, friend and neighbor of Zora Neale Hurston. Other materials were donated in 1970 and 1971 by Frances Grover, daughter of E. O. Grover, a Rollins College professor and long-time friend of Hurston's. In 1979 Stetson Kennedy of Jacksonville, who knew Hurston through his work with the Federal Writers Project, added additional papers.
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Zora Neale Hurston lived briefly in Memphis with her brother, Bob and his wife, then moved to Baltimore, Maryland where she worked as a waitress. In 1917, Hurston began attending night school. She graduated from Morgan Academy (high school division of what is now Morgan State University) in 1918 and moved to Washington, D. C.
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Zora Neale Hurston was born in 1891, in Notasulga, Alabama, although she spent most of her childhood in Eatonville, Florida, the first incorporated black township in the United States. In Eatonville, Hurston's father, a Baptist preacher, served three terms as mayor. With the death of her mother in 1904, Hurston's protected childhood ended abruptly. Her father remarried shortly after her mother's death and Hurston went to live with relatives. In 1915, she found employment as a maid with a traveling Gilbert and Sullivan musical theater group. Working as both a maid and manicurist, she completed her high school education at Morgan Academy in Baltimore. In 1923, she enrolled in Howard University, a historically black college in Washington, D. C., where she majored in English and got to know the eminent Harlem Renaissance scholar, Alain Locke, a philosophy professor.
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Zora Neale Hurston