Zora Neale Hurston
Keeper of stories
Zora Neale Hurston was an American novelist, folklorist and anthropologist, and one of the great voices of the Harlem Renaissance.
Hurston was born in Alabama in 1891 and grew up in Eatonville, Florida, one of the first incorporated all-Black towns in the United States, whose porch-front storytelling she never forgot. She studied anthropology at Barnard College under Franz Boas and returned to the South to collect folktales, songs and religious practices.
Her collection Mules and Men (1935) preserved the tales and hoodoo traditions of Florida and Louisiana; in the same year she travelled with the young Alan Lomax recording songs in Georgia, Florida and the Bahamas. Her novel Their Eyes Were Watching God (1937), written in seven weeks in Haiti, is now counted among the classics of American literature.
She died in poverty in 1960 and was buried in an unmarked grave. In 1973 the writer Alice Walker sought it out and set a stone upon it, and Hurston’s work has since been restored to a wide readership. The Order honours her for preserving the voices of a people, and for adding her own to them.