Who was Zora Neale Hurston?
Zora Neale Hurston lived many lives during her all to unrecognized existance. Even the epigraph that graces the headstone that Alice Walker placed at her grave at the Garden of Heavenly Rest in 1973, Zora Neale Hurston “A Genius of the South” 1901—1960 Novelist, Folklorist, Anthropologist does not fully or acurately capture her multifaceted existance. She was a woman as Mary Helen Washington elequently observed “half in shadow.” Even the birthdate printed on the tombstone, a birthdate that Hurston cites in her autobiography, proves inaccurate as family records indicate that she was born a full decade earlier. Furthermore, Hurston held many more occupations than the three listed in her epigraph. She worked as a playwrite, an anthropologist, a high school and college Drama professor, a director, a librarian, a producer, and in her latter and more impoverished years a maid. In 1925, Zora Neale Hurston traveled to Harlem to take part in the self-consciously created Harlem Renaissance wit
