Zora Neale Hurston
Cheryl R Hopson, Reaktion, £12.99

THIS is the story of an exceptional African-American woman, a creative writer, an anthropologist and a folklorist, who grew up in the Deep South in the post-reconstruction period. 

Although she was born into a virulently violent, white supremacist society, she succeeded in gaining artistic and professional success through sheer determination and talent, becoming a key figure in the Harlem Renaissance. 

Cheryl R Hopson’s biography explores Zora Neale Hurston’s life and works, emphasising her remarkable achievements, whil recognising some of her inherent contradictions. 

Although she was born in Alabama in 1891, Hurston’s family moved to the township of Eastonville in 1894, an all-black enclave that offered some protection from the racism beyond. These early experiences gave her confidence in her own worth as well as giving her confidence in the value of black society and culture. It was only at the age of 13, after her mother’s death and when her father sent her off to Jacksonville that she became fully conscious of herself as being black in a white supremacist society, as she later explained. 

After this move to Jacksonville, she made her own way. She managed to obtain an education, by whatever means (including making herself out to be 10 years younger than she actually was in order to get free high school tuition), eventually gaining entrance to Barnard College, Columbia University, the only black female student at that time.  

There she came to study anthropology, impressed by one of the discipline’s founding fathers, Franz Boas, an innovative academic who inspired her subsequent professional development in this field. Boas firmly rejected the view that there were cultural hierarchies, from primitive cultures through to the cultures of white Western civilisations. On the contrary, in Boas’s view different cultures, including black US cultures, had value in their own right and should be recognised as such.

Hurston went on to pursue anthropological studies in the Deep South, including studies of folklore and music in the Eastonville of her youth. Her findings were published as anthropological reports as well as featuring in her first novel, published in 1934. 

Subsequent studies featured voodoo practices in Jamaica, practices that she clearly found intriguing despite being an atheist herself. 

Meanwhile Hurston had also become a prominent member of the community of the Harlem Renaissance in New York, counting the poet Langston Hughes and others among her friends. Although she valued these cultural connections, she had differences with some of her friends’ political views, including differences with Langston Hughes’ and Richard Wright’s political radicalism. Hurston seems to have been more of an individualist in her approach, as illustrated by the gutsy protagonist of her best-known novel, Their Eyes Were Watching God (1937), who found her own ways of dealing with racism, colourism and sexism. 

Although Hurston was very successful for a time, interest in her writings declined in her later years. She died in poverty and relative obscurity in 1960. It was only subsequently, in 1975, that she was rediscovered by the black writer Alice Walker who brought her to the attention of a new readership. 

Hopson’s book identifies some of the controversies about Hurston’s life and works. There were criticisms of her as an academic, for example, including the criticism that she had allowed her desire to tell a compelling story to take her writing beyond the evidence from the facts. It seems that she did admit to doing this on one occasion.  

Her autobiography was not entirely accurate either, including discrepancies about her age and various marriages. She was in fact married three times, although the autobiography only mentions two husbands. 

And there were criticisms of her writing style, including her use of African-American speech patterns. This was seen as demeaning by some of her critics at the time, although others have praised the richness of Hurston’s innovative use of language.

Overall, Hopson’s book focuses on her subject’s positive achievements, rather than focusing on the criticisms of her as an academic and a creative writer who related her writings to her own life experiences as a “new woman” of her time. 

However, Morning Star readers might have been interested to learn more about other aspects of her life, including more about her political views from the inter-war period through to the era of the civil rights movement. She has been described as a libertarian rather than a progressive radical, and deeply suspicious of the state as a potential threat to individual liberty. She was critical of the New Deal, for example, fearing that this would create a culture of dependency. And she was doubtful about educational desegregation, fearing that this would entail the loss of good black schools.  

In summary, then, this is an engaging read. But there remains more to be said about this remarkable but controversial woman.