Zora Neale Hurston was born in 1890? in  Eatonville, Florida.  Her Father was  the town's 3 time elected Mayor and a local preacher.  Her  mother died when she was nine.  As a child she  always had three meals a day and never wore hand me downs.  Compared to her neighbors she was a privileged  child.  Also, as a child  Zora would  hang around the general store and listen to guitars, banjos, and the blues.  Also, it was the general store that she listen to the old timers  make up stories all the day long.  It was there that she learned the art of telling ethnic folk  stories.  After her mother died her father remarried, but Zora never did get along with her stepmother.  She was send away to live with relatives.  At fourteen she was on her own working as a maid and later as a wardrobe assistant for a traveling show.  She enrolled herself in a Baltimore high school at sixteen and after graduation she enrolled in Howard University.
At Howard she met  the man who was the undisputed impresario of The Harlem Renaissance, he was the man who was the force behind the writers of the Renaissance -  his name was Alaine Locke.  He recognized Zora's talent for writing Negro folklore and recommended she go to Harlem.
In Harlem Zora became the friend and employee of the novelist Fannie Hurst.  She also received a scholarship to attend Barnard College from it's founder Annie Nathan Myer. At Barnard she studied anthropology.
In 1927 she was commissioned by the wealthy  widow Charlotte "Godmother" Mason to travel to the south and collect black folklore.  She would not return north until 1929.
After the Renaissance in the 1930s she began to publish her books (5) , along with essays and drama stories.  The black folklore she collected in the south was published in 1935 under the title, "Mules and Men."  In 1937 she published her classic masterpiece, "Their Eyes Were Watching God."
Unfortunately,  after two more books in the late 1940s Zora's life took a turn for the worse.  She was falsely accused of sexual abuse and she became very depressed.  She could only find work as a maid and military librarian.  In the end she was a ward of the state , living in a welfare home.  When she died in 1960 she was laid to rest in an unmarked grave.
Thirteen years later the popular African American writer Alice Walker found the grave  and on it placed a monument which read simply, "Zora Neale Hurston : A Genius of the South."