Zora Neale Hurston

This quote is from the following passage, an excerpt from Zora Neale Hurston's “Characteristics of Negro Expression”: The primitive man exchanges descriptive words. His terms are all close...

In her essay, "How It Feels to Be Colored Me," Zora Neale Hurston begins by describing her childhood in Eatonville, Florida—an all-black community. She recalls seeing passing white visitors,...

This is a term I've never come across before so I'm not sure exactly how it's usually applied. The phrase "local color" and the phrase "writer of color" are two terms that seem completely separate....

Numerous similarities exist between the story of Adam and Eve in the Bible and the story of Missie May and Joe in Zora Neale Hurston’s short story “The Gilded Six-Bits.” Among those similarities...

On the face of it, it would seem that Delia (from the story "Sweat") is very different from the Hurston that declares that "sometimes she has no race." Delia is not given to that sort of...

One of the most interesting things I have always remembered about Zora Neal Hurston is something very bold which she did--both as a woman and as an African-American. She was writing during the...

There are at least a couple of different texts in which Zora Neale Hurston describes Eatonville, Florida, a town where she grew up but also one in which she set her best-known novel, Their Eyes...

Although she worked as an anthropologist for much of her life, Zora Neale Hurston is most famous for her writing, most especially her novel Their Eyes Were Watching God, considered a classic of the...

In her essay "How It Feels to be Colored Me," Zora Neale Hurston mentions what she calls the "sobbing school of Negrohood who hold that nature somehow has given them a lowdown dirty deal." The...

Jump at the Sun: Zora Neale Hurston’s Cosmic Comedy is John Lowe’s scholarly analysis of Hurston’s work that focuses on its comedic aspects. Lowe argues that the elements of humor that Hurston uses...

Zora Neale Hurston was widely known as a writer and political activist during the Harlem Renaissance. However, there were many things that contributed to her lack of success during her lifetime....

Local color refers to the customs, speech, clothing, and other cultural attributes of a place or time period that contribute to its characterization. Much of the early description of the setting...

In two of Hurston's novels Their Eyes Were Watching God and Jonah's Gourd Vine, the portrayal of marriage and women is one of hardship. The protagonist Janie of Their Eyes Were Watching God is...