Zora Neale Hurston Controversy

Zora Neale Hurston received a lot of criticism after she published her book Their Eyes Were Watching God especially from other black authors such as Richard Wright. Wright thought and claimed that black writers should support black society and try to get political support as well. Wright also claimed that they should show  the characters they right about as a higher class. However, Hurston and other writers of the Harlem Renaissance did not agree with Wright and instead wrote books of black community and individualism. Hurston was also criticized for not addressing racial issues.
I think that Zora Neale Hurston didn't deserve any criticism that she received. She didn't deserve it becuase she wasn't being racist or suggesting that all black men are abusive to their wives or lazy. " Their Eyes Were Watching God" were based on her own personal experiences. Plus back then being a man still had benifits in which you were of higher class and the boss in the relationship. Back then, all men, white or black, hit their wives becuase they could and it showed power and control. This was common and i find it in no way shocking or offensive to point in ant racial direction.


Epstein, Marcus. "Black Libertarian: The Story of Zora Neale Hurston." LewRockwell.com. Web. 17 Apr. 2011. http://www.lewrockwell.com/orig/epstein2.html.

Into the Wild Final Assesment

Their Eyes Were Watching God

"you got to jump at de sun."

Zora Neale Hurston

1. Zora Neale Hurston (1891-1960), American writer and folklorist, whose anthropological study of her racial heritage, at a time when black culture was not a popular field of study, influenced the Harlem Renaissance writers of the 1930s
2. Born in Notasulga, Alabama and raised from an early age in Eatonville, Florida, Hurston was educated at Howard University, at Barnard College, and at Columbia University, where she studied under German American anthropologist Franz Boas.
3. Hurston also collected folklore in Jamaica, Haiti, Bermuda, and Honduras. Mules and Men (1935), one of her best-known folklore collections, was based on her field research in the American South. Tell My Horse (1938) described folk customs in Haiti and Jamaica.
4. Hurston is noted for her metaphorical language, her story-telling abilities, and her interest in and celebration of Southern black culture in the United States. Her best-known novel is Their Eyes Were Watching God (1937) in which she tracked a Southern black woman's search, over 25 years and 3 marriages, for her true identity and a community in which she can develop that identity.
   5. Hurston's work was not political, but her characters' use of dialect, her manner of portraying black culture, and her conservatism created controversy within the black community.
   6. Throughout her career she addressed issues of race and gender, often relating them to the search for freedom.
   7. In her later years Hurston experienced health problems, and she died impoverished and unrecognized by the literary community.
   8.  Her writings, however, were rediscovered in the 1970s by a new generation of black writers, notably Alice Walker, and many of Hurston's works were republished.
   9.  Hurston's prolific literary output also includes such novels as Jonah's Gourd Vine (1934) and Seraph on the Suwanee (1948); short stories; plays; journal articles; and an autobiography, Dust Tracks on a Road (1942).
   10. In 1995 a two-volume set of her fiction and nonfiction writings was published. Go Gator and Muddy the Water: Writings by Zora Neale Hurston from the Federal Writers’ Project appeared in 1999. Hurston wrote this collection of articles on the folklore of African American Floridians for the Florida Federal Writers’ Project between 1938 and 1939. The 1995 and 1999 collections contain previously unpublished work.