From her earliest days, Hurston was a proficient reader. She impressed several Northern white women with her reading performance at the Hungerford School in Eatonville. According to her own account in Dust Tracks on a Road, the women gave her stuffed dates and preserved ginger, a roll of new pennies, an Episcopal hymn-book, Swiss Family Robinson, and a book of fairytales. A month after they returned home to Minneapolis, they sent her a box of clothes and more books: Gulliver's Travels, Grimm's Fairy Tales, Greek and Roman myths, and Norse tales.¹ Hurston claims the roll of pennies as a moment of joy: “The nearest thing to that moment was the telegram accepting my first book.”²

Besides her seven books, during her lifetime Hurston saw her work in more than two dozen diverse publications, including: Negro World, Opportunity, New Negro, Messenger, Fire!, Forum, Ebony and Topaz, Journal of Negro History, World Tomorrow, Journal of American Folklore, Negro, Challenge, New York Herald Tribune Books, Washington Tribune, Saturday Review, Cordially Yours, Southern Literary Messenger, American Mercury, Saturday Evening Post, Negro Digest, New York Herald Tribune Weekly Book Review, American Legion Magazine, Pittsburgh Courier, Orlando Sentinel, and Fort Pierce Chronicle.

Also during her lifetime, her second novel, Their Eyes Were Watching God, was translated into Italian as l loro occhi guardavano Dio (1938); into Czech, ich oci vyzeraly Boha (1947); and into Danish, sort kaerlighed (1947). It appears today in many translations, including Japanese, Korean, Spanish, and French. Tell My Horse appeared in England as Voodoo Gods in 1939 and sold briskly, repaying her $500 advance in the first week. In 1941 Moses, Man of the Mountain also had an English publication, and was translated into Italian as Mosé; l'uomo della montagna in 1946.

She was awarded a Guggenheim fellowship in 1936 for study in West Indies—it was renewed in 1937—and an honorary doctor of letters degree from Morgan State College in 1939. By 1942 Hurston was profiled in Who's Who in America, Current Biography, and Twentieth Century Authors. For Dust Tracks on a Road, she won the $1,000 Anisfeld-Wolf Book Award for the best book on race relations in 1943. She appeared on the cover of Saturday Review on 20 February 1943. Also in 1943, she received the Distinguished Alumni Award from Howard University, and in 1956 she received the Award for Education and Human Relations from Bethune-Cookman College.

Notes

1. Zora Neale Hurston, Dust Tracks on a Road, in Folklore, Memoirs, and Other Writings, ed. Cheryl A. Wall (New York: Library of America, 1995), pp. 592-4.

2. Zora Neale Hurston, Dust Tracks on a Road, in Folklore, Memoirs, and Other Writings, ed. Cheryl A. Wall (New York: Library of America, 1995).