The Gilded Six-Bits | Author Biography

Zora Neale Hurston was born January 7, 1903, in the all-black town of Eatonville, Florida. She was the daughter of John and Lucy Hurston. Her father worked as a preacher and a carpenter and also served as Eatonville's mayor. Her mother, a seamstress, was a powerful and positive influence in Hurston's life, encouraging her daughter to ‘‘jump at de sun.’’ She died when Hurston was nine, her father quickly remarried, and Hurston was sent to boarding school. While still a child, Hurston worked at many odd jobs. A white employer eventually arranged for her to attend high school at Morgan Preparatory School in Baltimore, Maryland, where she graduated in 1918. Biographer Robert E. Hemenway writes that ‘‘the sources of the Hurston self-confidence were her home town, her family, and the self-sufficiency demanded of her after she left home for the world.’’

Zora Neale Hurston
Zora Neale Hurston

Hurston went on to Howard University, publishing her first stories while a student there. After receiving an Associate's Degree, she struck out for Harlem, which had become a thriving center for black culture. The witty and outgoing Hurston took the town by storm, charming the black intelligentsia and white patrons of the blossoming artistic movement known as the Harlem Renaissance. She soon won a scholarship to attend the prestigious Barnard College, becoming its first black student. Here began her lifelong interest in anthropology. She received a B.A. from Barnard in 1928.

While studying, Hurston continued to publish short stories. In 1933, she published ‘‘The Gilded Six-Bits,’’ and her first novel, Jonah's Gourd Vine, came out the following year. In 1935, she published Mules and Men, a collection of folklore gathered from her native Eatonville. Dividing her time between fiction and anthropology, Hurston began graduate studies in anthropology at Columbia University in 1935 and wrote what is widely considered her best novel, Their Eyes Were Watching God (1937), while doing field work in the West Indies.

Ambitious and frank to a fault, Hurston made enemies as well as friends in Harlem. But despite the fact that she had become a celebrated writer, she never lost her sense of humor or forgot her roots. The flamboyant and exuberant Hurston could talk to anyone, from rich benefactors to illiterate farmers. Her memories of the self-segregated Eatonville community stayed close to her heart, leading her to oppose school desegregation in the 1950s, against the rising tide of the Civil Rights Movement.

In her middle age, Hurston fell on hard times. She supported herself as a screenwriter and college drama instructor but was later reduced to working as a maid, a job she had never been good at in her youth. Hurston was married twice briefly and had no children. She suffered a stroke in 1959, and died in a public home the following year. She was buried in an unmarked grave at a segregated cemetery in Fort Pierce, Florida.