Zora Neale Hurston:(January 7, 1891 – January 28, 1960)
Zora Neale Hurston was born January 7, 1891 in Notasulga, Alabama to John and Lucy Hurston. During her life, Zora Neale Hurston claimed her birthdate and place as the year 1901 in Eatonville, Florida, an all-black neighborhood, one of the first in the United States of America. Her family moved back to this place within the first years of her life where her father, who was a preacher and a carpenter, was elected mayor for three terms. Her mother died in 1904 and her father remarried sometime later. After finishing Morgan Academy in Baltimore in 1917, Zora Neale Hurston went on to historically black college Howard University while supporting herself as a manicurist. According to the University of Minnesota, her first published story appeared in Howard University’s literary magazine in 1921 and she received recognition in 1925 when another story was accepted by the New York magazine Opportunity, edited by Charles S. Johnson. After she won second place in the Opportunity contest, Johnson and others, including Alain Locke, encouraged Hurston to move to New York. One of her earliest works was called “Mule Bone,” which was a comedy that she had written along with Langston Hughes. To this day, one of her most famous works is “Their Eyes were watching God,” which was adapted into a movie produced and directed by Oprah Winfrey. Zora Neale Hurston grew from a young child who dramatized the Greco-Roman tale of Persephone to a prolific author challenged the hate that she saw everyday and broke the color barriers of the pen. She truly was a genius of the south.