Zora Neale Hurston

I studied Zora Neale Hurston my freshman year of High School. I can almost vividly remember  the story about Hurston's personal life because that really intrigued me. How Hurston embraced the negative and harsh feelings from her Father. The death of her mother was an extremely huge deal for Hurston because she was only eleven. She continued forth went through college and she soon became one of the most celebrated Women Writers of all time. Much of this information was read in LAWL all except for her state weeks before her death. I asked this question in class today and decided to do more research!

"Many of her contemporaries felt she was not seeing the whole picture, and as the civil rights movement burgeoned in the years after World War II and the majority of black writers adopted this as a theme, Zora's literary appeal waned.  Then her reputation was scathed in 1948 when she was arrested for molesting a ten-year-old retarded boy; the charges were later dropped.
Despite this scandal, it was much of Zora's own doing that tarnished her reputation.  She wrote an article in 1950 attacking the right of blacks to vote in the south, charging that votes were being bought.  Then she railed the desegregation ruling in Brown vs. the Board of Education of Topeka, Ks. in 1954, on the grounds that black children do not need to go to school with white children in order to learn; to this many civil right leaders took umbrage.  Zora wrote for such right wing publications as American Legion Magazine and campaigned for the ultraconservative Senator Robert Taft of Ohio for the GOP presidential nomination in 1952.  This only alienated black America more and more.
Poverty and obscurity marked Zora's last years, during which she worked mostly as a domestic-as she had started out.  She worked on a book The Life of Herod the Great, but never completed it.  Illness finally overcame her when she suffered a severe stroke in 1959, after which she was committed to the Saint Lucie County Welfare Home in Fort Pierce, Fla.  It was here that Zora Neale Hurston died of hypertensive heart disease on Jan. 28, 1960.
For all the opprobrium that Zora Neale Hurston received later in her career, the brilliance of her literary works cannot be denied.  Future black writers such as Ralph Ellison, Toni Morrison and Alice Walker were greatly influenced by her books, and ironically they have addressed the issue of prejudice in their books.  And any aspect of black culture that remains preserved today and continues to enlighten us owes its status in one way or another to Zora Neale Hurston."
 

Women in History. Zora Neal Hurston biography - extended . Last Updated: 9/14/2012. Lakewood Public Library. Date accessed 9/14/2012 . <http://www.lkwdpl.org/wihohio/hurs-zorx.htm>.