By the time that once-acclaimed African-American anthropologist and author Zora Neale Hurston died on January 28, 1960, her impressive body of work had all but slid into obscurity. All of her stories and novels had gone out of print, and she was all but forgotten until a kindly neighbor lent novelist Alice Walker a copy of Hurston’s Their Eyes Were Watching God. Deeply moved by the novel’s depiction of the experience of being a black woman in the early 20th Century South, Walker embarked on a pilgrimage to research Hurston’s forgotten life and work.

Despite initial critical success, Hurston’s work became marginalized over time for cultural and political reasons that had little to do with the quality of her work. A dedicated folklorist, Hurston’s characters were written in African-American dialect, a style that was generally frowned upon within the African-American community. While this naturalistic approach to dialogue is commonplace in African-American literature written today, many prominent members of the black intelligensia believed that dialect writing reinforced racist stereotypes. The most stinging criticism came at the hands of Richard Wright, the pre-eminent African-American author of Native Son, who wrote in his review of Their Eyes Were Watching God:

… The sensory sweep of her novel carries no theme, no message, no thought. In the main, her novel is not addressed to the Negro, but to a white audience whose chauvinistic tastes she knows how to satisfy. She exploits that phase of Negro life which is “quaint,” the phase which evokes a piteous smile on the lips of the “superior” race.

Wright’s political views and style reflected the prevailing norms of African-American intellectual community during the 1930s and 1940s. Wright’s work was explicitly political, and he believed that other African-American artists had a responsibility to be political as well. Hurston’s work, on the other hand, was mostly peopled with intimate portraits of individual characters and communities, and therefore dealt only indirectly with political issues. As such, Hurston was gradually exiled from African-American intellectual circles, and the critical reception to her work suffered accordingly.

During Walker’s pilgrimage, she discovered Hurston’s unmarked grave in Ft. Pierce, Florida. Determined to honor her idol, Walker installed a headstone in its place, and had it inscribed “A Genius of the South.” Walker memorialized her experience in a 1975 Ms. Magazine article titled “In Search of Zora Neale Hurston.” The publication of this article fortuitously dovetailed with the emerging prominence of many female African-American novelists, such as Toni Morrison and Maya Angelou. This resulted in a major revival of interest in Hurston’s work. Now, her novels and short stories are widely read in English Literature classes, and in 2002 she was included amongst scholar Molefi Kete Asante’s list of the 100 Greatest African-Americans of all time.

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