Zora Neale Hurston

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Have you ever heard of Zora Neale Hurston? Zora Hurston was an American folklorist and author during the time of the Harlem Renaissance. Hurston is a successful American author because of her life, success as a writer, and contributions to literature and American society. Hurston was the fifth of eight children of John Hurston and Lucy Ann Hurston. Her father was a Baptist preacher, tenant farmer, and carpenter, and her mother was a schoolteacher (Wikipedia). Even though Zora Neale Hurston claimed as an adult that she was born in Eatonville, Florida in 1901, she was actually born in Notasulga, Alabama, where her father grew up; her family moved to Eatonville (Wikipedia). In 1904 her mother died and her father remarried almost immediately. John Hurston, her father, and new stepmother sent her away to Jacksonville, Florida for school. She later worked as a maid to the lead singer in a traveling Gilbert & Sullivan theatrical company (Wikipedia). In 1917, Hurston began attending Morgan Academy, the high school division of Morgan College in Baltimore, Maryland. It was at this time, and apparently to qualify for a free high-school education, that a 26-year-old Hurston began claiming 1901 as her date of birth (Wikipedia). She graduated from Morgan Academy in 1918. As an adult, Hurston traveled extensively in the Caribbean and the American south and immersed herself in local cultural practices to conduct her anthropological research (Wikipedia). In 1927, she married Herbert Sheen, a jazz musician and former classmate at Howard who would later become a physician, but the marriage ended in 1931(Wikipedia). In 1939, while Hurston was working for the WPA, she married Albert Price, a 23 year old fellow WPA Employee, but this marriage, too, ended after only months (Wikipedia). In later life, in addition to continuing her literary career, Hurston served on the faculty of

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