Zora Neale Hurston was born January 7, 1891, or 1901, in Eatonville, Florida, the first incorporated exclusively African American town in the United States. (The year of Hurston’s birth, probably 1891, is in dispute). A voracious reader, Hurston learned to decipher words before kindergarten but obstacles in childhood, including the death of her mother when she was nine, prevented her from attending high school until her twenties. Hurston went on to attend Howard University, later earning a scholarship to Barnard College. At Barnard Hurston studied anthropology under the tutelage of famed social scientist Franz Boas before graduating in 1928. For several years she worked as an apprentice anthropologist, documenting the folklore of African Americans in the South, as well as Caribbean rituals and culture. Hurston had earlier won second prize in a magazine contest sponsored by the African American organization the Urban League (the so-called “Opportunity” contest). In 1935 she became the first African American to publish a detailed account of Southern folk traditions and the Southern black experience in Mules and Men. A decade earlier her first story, “Spunk,” had incorporated Southern folk tales and colloquialisms. “Sweat” followed, incorporating colloquialisms too, but this time in a tale that showed her talent for depicting a slice of domestic life in a black southern town.
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