Zora Neale Hurston (1903-1960), folklorist and novelist, was best known for her collection of African American folklore Mules and Men (1935) and her novel Their Eyes Were Watching God (1937), in which she charted a young African American woman's journey for personal fulfillment.

Zora Neale Hurston was born on January 7, 1903, in Eatonville, Florida, to Reverend John and Lucy Hurston. Zora's mother died when she was nine years old, and her father soon remarried. Her relationship with her stepmother rapidly deteriorated, and her father sent her to school in Jacksonville. In her early teens she became a wardrobe girl in a Gilbert and Sullivan repertory company touring the South. Eighteen months later she enrolled in Morgan Academy in Baltimore in 1917. She graduated a year later and went to Howard University, where she completed a year and a half of course work between 1919 and 1924. She secured a scholarship which allowed her to...