Zora Neale Hurston

Exhibition Label: Zora Neale Hurston was a writer and anthropologist whose novels and essays revealed the vital ethnic culture of southern African Americans. Raised in the all-black town of Eatonville, Florida, Hurston moved to New York City to study with Franz Boas and became a striking, stylish figure of the Harlem Renaissance. A charismatic raconteur, Hurston was brutally honest in writing and in person. In Mules and Men (1935), she captured the rich voices and mythos of the African American oral storytelling tradition. In Their Eyes Were Watching God (1937), her heroine learns independence the hard way and concisely captures the modernist ethos of the self: "You gotta go there to know there." In her essays Hurston analyzed the aesthetics of spirituals, sermon s, juke joints, and African American vernacular English. Alice Walker’s rediscovery of Hurston in the early 1980s—after four decades of neglect—remains one of the great comeback stories in American literary history.

Topic: Costume\Jewelry\Necklace; Interior; Costume\Headgear\Hat; Zora Neale Hurston: Female; Zora Neale Hurston: Literature\Writer\Novelist; Zora Neale Hurston: Humanities and Social Sciences\Folklorist; Portrait

National Portrait Gallery

Restrictions & Rights: 1935 negative © Carl Van Vechten Trust Gravure and compilation ©The Eakins Press Foundation

Medium: Photogravure
Dimensions: Image: 22.5 x 14.9cm (8 7/8 x 5 7/8"); Sheet: 55.7 x 35.6cm (21 15/16 x 14"); Mat (custom size): 61 x 40.6cm (24 x 16")

1935 (printed 1983)