How it Feels to be Colored Me Study Guide

Zora Neal Hurston was born in 1891 in Alabama, although her family moved shortly afterward to the thriving African-American community of Eatonville, Florida. Passionate and willful from a young age, Hurston was in frequent conflict with her father, a preacher. After the death of her mother in 1904, family discord drove Hurston to join a traveling theater troupe. She didn’t finish high school until well into her twenties. Afterward, at Howard University, Hurston began to write and publish her first short stories. She started to attract widespread acclaim for her writing after moving to New York and linking up with several other prominent African-American writers and artists who together formed a movement called the Harlem Renaissance. While in New York, she also pursued further education in anthropology at Barnard College and made several trips to locations in the American south to study African-American history and folklore. In the ‘30s and ‘40s, Hurston published her most enduring novels, including Their Eyes Were Watching God, but she never achieved her full due of financial security and recognition.

After the Civil War, Union forces and congressional Republicans pushed to ensure a measure of financial and political agency for newly freed African-American southerners. By the 1870s, these efforts had stalled out in the face of white southern resistance and northern indifference, and white southerners filled the power vacuum with campaigns of terror against the black population. Hurston grew up in Eatonville, Florida, a successful African-American town, and so was spared the worst of this discrimination in her early childhood, but she soon encountered various forms of explicit and implicit racism as she moved to other parts of the south and then north to Baltimore and Manhattan, which in turn influenced her work. While in New York, Hurston participated in the Harlem Renaissance, which created a community of talented African-American writers and eased her entry into the New York literary world.

Zora Neale Hurston was a prominent figure in the Harlem Renaissance, a flowering of art and literature in the predominantly African-American neighborhood of New York City in the 1920s and ‘30s. Hurston befriend and collaborated with many other figures in the movement, including poets Langston Hughes and Countee Cullen, whose work both celebrated and lamented the African-American experience in the early 20th century. Hurston also corresponded with W.E.B. DuBois, a towering figure for many African-American writers of the time whose essay collection The Souls of Black Folk investigates ways African-Americans navigate a racially stratified and oppressive society. Finally, Hurston’s own study of the folklore, stories, and songs of black southerners proved an enduring influence on her work, including her most famous novel, Their Eyes Were Watching God.