Mule Bone | Author Biography
Zora Neale Hurston was born January 7, 1891, in Eatonville Florida. She was forced to leave school at age thirteen so that she could care for her brother’s children. She was later able to return to school and eventually studied Anthropology at Barnard College and Columbia University. During this time, Hurston began publishing short stories. In 1927, together with Langston Hughes and other artists, she founded a literary magazine, Fire!, which was devoted to African-American culture. The magazine quickly folded, and after graduation, Hurston returned to Florida to complete research for her anthropological studies.
The information she gathered on Negro folklore became the basis for much of her writing. Hurston published her first novel, Jonah’s Gourd Vine, in 1934 and a collection of short stories, Mules and Men, in 1935. Her most famous work, Their Eyes Were Watching God, was published in 1937. By the 1940s, Hurston’s career had begun to fail. Publishers, who thought that her recent work lacked the depth and insight of previous efforts, rejected her work. An autobiography, Dust Tracks on a Road, was published in 1942, and her last published novel, Seraph on the Suwanee, was published in 1948.
Hurston spent the last years of her life in Florida, where she worked variously as a cleaning woman, a librarian, a newspaper reporter, and a substitute teacher. She died penniless at the Saint Lucie County, Florida, Welfare Home January 28, 1960. Hurston was buried in an unmarked grave in the Fort Pierce segregated cemetery.
(James) Langston Hughes was born in Joplin, Missouri, on February 1, 1902. Hughes’s parents separated shortly after his birth. His father eventually settled in Mexico and his mother left him in the care of his maternal grandmother, who raised Hughes until her death in 1910. For the next four years, Hughes lived with family friends and relatives until he joined his mother and new stepfather in Ohio in 1914.
Having encountered racism at Columbia University, Hughes dropped out of college after his freshman year and began working a series of odd jobs. While working as a bus boy in a hotel in Washington D. C., Hughes placed three poems on poet Vachel Lindsay’s dinner plate. The resulting attention eventually led Hughes to a critic who helped him publish his first collection of poems, The Weary Blues, in 1926. Shortly after this publication, Hughes enrolled in Lincoln University in Pennsylvania, where he continued writing.
Hughes’s first collection of short fiction, The Ways of White Folks, was published in 1934, and a series of sketches known as his ‘‘Simple Tales,’’ which were about a black Everyman, were published in the Chicago Defender. The Simple Tales were very popular with black readers and were eventually published in a series of books. Hughes also began writing drama in the 1930s, but he always considered himself primarily a poet. Although his work sometimes received mixed reactions from blacks who were concerned that he emphasized lower-class life and presented an unfavorable image of his race, Hughes’s work was a critical success and he received many honors and awards during his life, including a Guggenheim fellowship for creative work in 1935. Hughes died May 22, 1967, of congestive heart failure in New York City.
Join eNotes
Over 3,500 study guides, question and answer forums, literature criticism, reference content, and much more!
Navigate
Related Topics
Tell a friend about Mule Bone at eNotes.
