There was a man who came into my shop on Ninth Street sometime in the mid-nineties. He was in his sixties, a retired postal worker, and he’d been coming in every few months for years. He read broadly and without a plan, which I’ve always considered a sign of a healthy reading life. That afternoon he picked up a copy of Their Eyes Were Watching God off the table where I kept the books I was pushing that week, turned it over, read the back, and said: “Who is this?” I told him. He said, “How come I’ve never heard of her?” I didn’t have a short answer for that. I told him to buy the book and come back when he’d finished it.

He came back three weeks later and bought three more.

That exchange happened dozens of times over the twenty-two years I ran that shop. Different people, same question. Who is this? The answer has two parts. Part one is easy: who Zora Neale Hurston was. Part two is harder and more important: why it took so long for the world to ask.

She was born on January 7, 1891, in Notasulga, Alabama, though she claimed Eatonville, Florida, as her home, and Eatonville is really where she’s from in the ways that matter. Eatonville was one of the first incorporated all-Black towns in the United States, a place with its own mayor and its own rhythms and its own way of being in the world, and Hurston grew up swimming in it. She went to Howard University, then made her way to New York during the Harlem Renaissance, then enrolled at Barnard College, where she studied anthropology under Franz Boas, one of the founding figures of modern cultural anthropology. She published four novels, two books of folklore, an autobiography, and dozens of stories and essays. She was brilliant, difficult, peripatetic, and funny. She wrote prose that moved like music.

She died broke and alone in a welfare home in Fort Pierce, Florida, on January 28, 1960. She was buried in an unmarked grave in a segregated cemetery. For nearly fifteen years after her death, most of her books were out of print.

The question of why she was lost matters as much as the books themselves. I’ve been thinking about it for fifty years.

The Disappearance

Part of the answer is Richard Wright. When Their Eyes Were Watching God came out in 1937, Wright reviewed it with a dismissal so withering it probably cost the book a generation of readers. He accused her of minstrel technique and said she was writing to make white people laugh. The accusation was wrong, and I suspect Wright knew it was wrong, but he was advancing a particular argument about what Black literature needed to do in the 1930s, and Hurston’s novel, with its joy and its folk idiom and its refusal to be primarily a protest document, didn’t fit his thesis.

The literary culture of the 1930s had very specific ideas about what Black writing was supposed to do. It was supposed to bear witness. It was supposed to indict. It was supposed to speak to white readers about the conditions of Black life in America. Hurston did some of this, in her way, but she also wrote about Black people having full inner lives that had nothing to do with the white gaze. She wrote about love and desire and community and spirit and the particular beauty of a world she’d grown up inside. Some critics couldn’t see past what she wasn’t doing long enough to see what she was doing.

There were also her politics. In 1955, she published a letter to the Orlando Sentinel opposing the Supreme Court’s Brown v. Board of Education decision, arguing that the ruling implied Black schools were inherently inferior. The letter was wrong in important ways and alienated many people who might have championed her work.

And then there’s the simpler, uglier answer: she was a Black woman in an era when Black women didn’t receive the kind of institutional attention that preserves a reputation after death. She had no powerful literary executor. No university press keeping her books in print. No critic with enough standing to insist the world keep paying attention.

These things happen. They shouldn’t, but they do. The consolation, such as it is, is that books are harder to kill than people.

Their Eyes Were Watching God (1937)

Start here. There’s no other place to begin.

This is the story of Janie Crawford, who grows up in Eatonville, moves through three marriages, and arrives by the end at a hard-won understanding of herself that feels true in the way only the best novels feel true. It’s a love story and a freedom story and a story about what a woman is owed by the people who claim to love her, and it does all of this in prose I’ve read six times and still stop on specific sentences.

The novel is written partly in the Black vernacular of early twentieth-century Florida, which some readers find disorienting on the first page and essential by page twenty. Hurston knew this language from the inside. She wasn’t rendering dialect for the curiosity of an outside audience; she was writing in a language that had its own grammar and its own genius, and she treated it with the same respect a novelist gives to any language.

If you’ve read James Baldwin’s essays and fiction and want to understand the other argument, the one that says Black literature doesn’t owe its existence to white anxiety, this is where you come. Baldwin wrote from exile and from anguish. Hurston wrote from inside the community, looking out, and what she saw was complicated and beautiful and sometimes devastating. Both are necessary. They’re the same conversation from different chairs.

Mules and Men (1935)

This was the first book-length collection of African American folklore published by a Black American author, and it still reads like the most alive piece of cultural preservation I’ve ever encountered.

Hurston went home. She drove back to Eatonville and to communities in Florida and Louisiana with a notebook and a recorder and she collected the stories, songs, and hoodoo practices of the people she’d grown up with. Franz Boas wrote the preface. The result is a book that functions simultaneously as anthropology, as literature, and as testimony.

What Hurston understood, and what her academic contemporaries often didn’t, is that folklore isn’t quaint. It’s a living technology. The stories a community tells encode its values, fears, humor, and methods of surviving in the world. When she wrote these stories down in the voices she heard them in, she was performing an act of profound respect that also happens to produce great reading.

I’ve given this book to people who said they didn’t read nonfiction. They came back converted.

Jonah’s Gourd Vine (1934)

Her first novel is the one people skip, and I understand why. It doesn’t have the structural perfection of Their Eyes Were Watching God, and it’s partly fictionalized autobiography, which can be an awkward hybrid. But it contains some of Hurston’s most extraordinary prose, particularly in the sermons she gives her protagonist, John Pearson, a preacher whose language is so magnificent that you sometimes forget what the novel is doing and just sit inside the sentences.

Pearson is partly based on her father, John Hurston, a Baptist minister who pastored a church in Eatonville and served as mayor of the town three times. If you want to understand where Hurston came from and why she heard language the way she did, this is the place to look. It’s a flawed book and it’s worth every page.

Tell My Horse (1938)

This is the one that surprises people.

After Mules and Men, Hurston went to Haiti and Jamaica on a Guggenheim fellowship to continue her anthropological fieldwork. Tell My Horse is what came out of it: part travel writing, part anthropology, part immersion journalism, entirely strange and entirely absorbing. She wrote about voodoo not as spectacle but as serious religious practice, and her accounts of the ceremonies she witnessed have a combination of scholarly precision and narrative immediacy that’s hard to describe and easy to feel on the page.

It’s also the most politically direct of her books. Her portrait of Haitian power structures and what she saw as American imperialism in the Caribbean is sharp and angry in ways that people who think they know Hurston’s politics are usually surprised by. She isn’t the writer her critics accused her of being.

Dust Tracks on a Road (1942)

I want to be honest with you about this one: it’s the most frustrating book Hurston ever wrote, and it’s also one of the most interesting.

Her autobiography is famous for what it omits. Her marriages go largely unmentioned. Certain events in her life are rendered in ways that don’t match the available record. She shifts her birthdate, obscures her origins, performs a version of herself that is charming and evasive in equal measure. Scholars have been arguing about what this evasiveness means for decades.

Here’s my reading, built from a lifetime of watching readers and books find each other: she was a Black woman writing her life story in 1942, and she gave the audience what she calculated they could receive. The things she kept back weren’t failures of honesty so much as strategic omissions by a woman who’d spent her whole life navigating a world that was only partly hospitable to her. What she did include, the Eatonville childhood, the Harlem years, her account of her own mind at work, gives you a Hurston who is alive on the page in ways most autobiographies never manage.

Read it knowing you’re reading a performance, and you’ll find the person behind it.

The Woman Who Found the Grave

Alice Walker went to Fort Pierce in 1973 looking for a grave. She was researching what would become an essay about Hurston and she needed to know where she was buried. She found a segregated cemetery in the Florida heat, grass grown up over the stones, no marker she could identify with certainty as Hurston’s. She placed a granite marker on what she believed was the right spot. It reads: “Zora Neale Hurston / ‘A Genius of the South’ / Novelist, Folklorist, Anthropologist / 1901-1960.”

The dates are wrong in a specific, very Hurston way: 1901 is the birth year she claimed in life, ten years younger than she actually was. Walker used what she had. It’s a detail Hurston herself might have appreciated.

Walker published “In Search of Zora Neale Hurston” in Ms. Magazine in March 1975. Robert Hemenway followed with a full literary biography in 1977. By 1978, Their Eyes Were Watching God was back in print with the University of Illinois Press, and a writer who had been functionally erased from American literature was being taught in university courses and shelved in bookshops again.

I watched this happen in real time. I was in my mid-twenties when Walker’s essay came out. I’d been reading Hurston for a few years by then, working my way through used copies, because that was the only way to find her. And then, gradually, she was everywhere. I’ve written elsewhere about the southern gothic tradition and the writers who shaped it, and Hurston belongs at the center of that conversation in ways the standard accounts keep underemphasizing. She didn’t just influence what came after her; she built part of the house that later writers moved into.

The revival wasn’t an accident and it wasn’t inevitable. It took Alice Walker standing in a Florida cemetery with a granite marker, insisting that this woman existed and mattered and deserved to be found. It took a scholar writing a four-hundred-page biography for a university press. It took booksellers putting her back on the table and saying: here. Start here.

Where to Begin

The person who has never read Hurston: start with Their Eyes Were Watching God and don’t let anyone tell you what to think about it before you do.

The person who read it in a classroom twenty years ago and only wrote a paper about it: read it again. It’s a different book now that you’re different.

The reader who thinks folklore is a quaint subject for specialists: read Mules and Men and come find me afterward.

The person who wants to understand where American literature came from, all of it, the full inheritance: you need these books. Not as background. As the thing itself.

My retired postal worker called me a few months after that first visit. He’d read everything she’d written that he could find. He wanted to know what to read next. I gave him Alice Walker.

That’s how it works when it works. One writer hands you another. The shelf grows. You never run out.