"Zora was funny, irreverent (she was the first to call the Harlem Renaissance literati the 'niggerati'), good-looking and sexy," wrote Alice Walker. Having been one of the most prolific African-American women writers of her time, Zora Neale Hurston was a renowned member of the Harlem Renaissance in the 1920s, a preeminent folklorist, and author of four novels, three nonfiction works, and numerous short stories, essays, and plays. In 1942 she reached the peak of her career with a Saturday Review cover story about her autobiography Dust Tracks on a Road; by 1950 she was working as a maid in Miami; and in 1960 she died in obscurity and was buried in an unmarked pauper's grave in Fort Pierce, Florida.

Robert E. Hemenway's Zora Neale Hurston: A Literary Biography described this enigmatic writer as "flamboyant and yet vulnerable, self- centered and yet kind, a Republican conservative and yet an early black nationalist...