Zora Neale Hurston (1891–1960)
From Zora Neale Hurston: Novels & Stories
One hundred years ago this spring, when Zora Neale Hurston was a part-time student at Howard University, her first published story appeared in the college magazine. She was twenty years old.
Or so she wanted everyone to believe. As she gradually made her way away from her family home in Florida, from Baltimore to Washington and finally to Harlem, she told friends and coworkers that she was the born in the all-Black town of Eatonville in 1901.
In fact, she was born in 1891 in Notasulga, Alabama, the fifth of Lucy Ann Potts and John Hurston’s eight children, although when she was three her family did move to Eatonville, where her father rose to be mayor for three terms. Her claim to be younger than she was not motivated by vanity. Instead, when she was 26 and living in Baltimore, she knocked ten years off her age so she could finish her high school education, which had been interrupted thirteen years earlier by her mother’s death. She left Florida after a notably vicious fight with her stepmother, eventually joining a traveling Gilbert and Sullivan troupe as a maid until a debilitating case of appendicitis stranded her in Baltimore.
And so, in January 1925, 34-year-old Zora Neal Hurston arrived in Harlem as a 24-year-old with an associate degree from Howard and $1.50 in her pocket. By the end of the year, she had earned two cash prizes for a short story and a play, a scholarship to Barnard College, and a position working as the live-in assistant to one of the best-selling novelists in the nation. We present her prize-winning story, “Spunk,” along with an introduction detailing her extraordinary first year in New York.
