* Personal History

    Zora Neale Hurston was the first African-American woman "to create language and imagery that reflected the reality of black women's lives" (Wall, 371).  This language and imagery that Hurston is known for was a result of the childhood she spent in Eatonville, Florida, the first incorporated all-black town in America.  The most accepted date of her birth is January 7, 1901, but the issue has been debated because other birth dates are possible as well.
    The seventh child in a family of eight, her only sister Sarah was her father's favorite child, so Hurston naturally drew closer to her mother.  Thus, when her mother died, while Hurston was a child, her life changed dramatically.  Hurston and two of her siblings were sent to boarding school for a year, during which time their father re-married.  Because their step-mother did not want the responsibility of caring for them, the children were sent to live with different relatives.  After several years, Hurston left to work for a traveling theater troupe, but left this troupe in Baltimore so that she could continue her education.
    Working her way through high school, Hurston eventually graduated from the Morgan Academy in 1918, then spent a few years at Howard University, in Washington, D.C.  While at Howard, Hurston belonged to the campus literary club, Stylus, which was headed by Alain Locke.  Locke was known for his dislike of women, and, at the first day of classes, he would guarantee an automatic "C" to any female student who would not show up to his class for the remainder of the semester.  However, Hurston, who was deeply inspired by Locke, was determined to remain involved in Stylus until she moved to Harlem in 1925.
    She began writing at this time, relying on her Southern background to create the folklore that she would eventually become famous for.  However, her folk characters and their speech would also become her downfall, because W.E.B. DuBois and others of the Harlem Renaissance considered folklore too primitive to be considered true art, and they wanted writing to be "untainted by racial
stereotype."  Hurston was further criticized because of her personality, which did not fit the typical role prescribed for women, as evidenced by her style of clothing and the bohemian community that she became a part of.
 
 

    After receiving a scholarship to attend Barnard College, the women's division of Columbia University, she studied under anthropologist Franz Boas, who was to have a profound influence on her life.  She used her knowledge of anthropology to further her career as an author, returning to Eatonville to collect data for her writing.  However, because Hurston was now so different from those in her hometown, this first trip was a failure.
    Hurston's later trips were sponsored by Mrs. Charlotte Mason, who gave her money to spend on her work but also required an exact account of how the money was spent.  "Godmother," as Mason was called by the artists she supported, had control over Hurston's writing, including the right to censor it.  Interestingly enough, Mason also supported another famous writer of the Harlem Renaissance, Langston Hughes, who was a close friend of Hurston's as well.  Unfortunately, Hughes' relationship with both women was severed forever after a falling out over a play that Hughes and Hurston had co-authored, "Mule Bone," which was never even staged nor printed in its entirety.
    Because of the problems of her first trip, Hurston adapted herself to becoming more like the Eatonville residents on her following visits, and met with more success.  She was particularly interested in the "lying sessions," such as those that she remembered hearing as a child, during which each person would compete to tell the tallest tale possible.  Because of this interest, she left Eatonville for Polk County, where, she was told, she could find the best liars in the world.  Both Eatonville and Polk County figure largely in her writing, for her memories as well as the stories she heard provided her with a wealth of fiction for her imagination to explore.
    In addition to folklore, voodoo became an important part of Hurston's anthropological studies, and she went to New Orleans in 1928 in order to study this religion.  Part of its attraction was the fact that voodoo's roots are in Africa, and Hurston was deeply interested in her black heritage.  Unlike many blacks, she was proud of her blackness, and sought to explore all of its facets.  After studying voodoo rites, including chants, prayers, songs, dances, and ritual sacrifices of animals such as sheep, goats, or chickens, Hurston decided to study the folklore of the Caribbean Islands.
    Financed by the Guggenheim Fellowship for two years, she spent six months in the West Jamaican mountains, among an isolated people group, the Maroons, descendants of fugitive slaves.  Hurston also made two trips to Haiti, where she continued her study of voodoo and developed an interest in the study of zombies.  Her work in this area led to later research in zombies, which revealed that they are actually caused by voodoo sects.  However, after falling violently ill, Hurston feared that someone was attempting to kill her for her interest in voodoo, so she returned to the United States.
    By this time in her life, Hurston's two brief love affairs had ended, both because she could not give up her work for a man.  Though she loved these men, her work was always first in her life, for writing was her first love.  As a result of her second break-up, Hurston wrote Their Eyes Were Watching God in 1937, while in Haiti, a novel which is often considered her masterpiece.  While white critics praised her accurate portrayal of Negro speech, black critics rejected the novel.  Hurston's depiction of blacks as common folks working in the bean fields was considered offensive by many, and Richard Wright, who considered writing a political tool, thought that the story was a "waste," for it did not call attention to the problem of inequality in America.
    However, Hurston's goal was to promote the cultural heritage of black Americans, not to discuss race relations, discrimination, Jim Crow laws, or any of the other topics so popular with her contemporaries.  Unlike many other black Americans of the time, for Hurston "being black was a joy, not a cross to bear; she liked herself and her color" (Lyons, 101).  Because she had grown up in an all-black community, Hurston had never even experienced segregation until she visited Jacksonville at some point during her childhood.  But, more importantly, Eatonville convinced her of the vitality and the promise of the black community, and she wanted to celebrate the black culture that she loved through her writing.  In some ways, Hurston was ahead of her time, for her racial pride would have fit in well with the black separatist movement of the 1960's, when black would finally be considered beautiful.
    Sadly, Hurston's works became more and more neglected, until she reached the point where she was living in extreme poverty, working at whatever odd jobs she could find.  After suffering from a stroke, she moved into a nursing home, where she died in 1973.  Though her friends raised the money for her funeral, her grave was left unmarked until Alice Walker visited it, many years later, and erected a headstone to her memory, calling Hurston "a genius of the South."  After years of obscurity, Hurston's work is finally being revived, and today she is considered one of the most important black writers of the twentieth century.

 

• Novels
• Short stories
• Mythology/Folklore
• Poetry
• Autobiography

    When writing or telling stories, Zora Neale Hurston takes on several different roles.  While gathering information for her stories, she becomes the listener, and while she writes her stories she takes on the role of the informer.   By the time Mules and Men was published, Hurston was not only an expert at collecting information, but she also had the ability to perform that information for her audience.
    Hurston uses her two audiences (informants and readers) to her advantage in taking control of the story.  She pits them against one another, allowing them to feed her creative imagination.  For example, the information the informant has may be something the reader was not aware of, and vice versa.  "Readers and informants serve her as she used wither group to achieve whatever purpose she needs to achieve at any given moment.  As a result of such manipulation, Hurston remains...center stage to the volume....  No matter her self-effacing, no matter her pretended innocence, no matter her allowing other people center stage at points, she remains the key to the success of the volume" (Harris, 9).
   Hurston's goal was to have her presence be dominate in her stories.  She wanted to manipulate her informants into giving her the information she wanted and her readers into listening what she had to say.  Because of this she was able to write books and stories that went against the accepted view of her time, perhaps making it possible for others to voice similar views. 

---

*Personal History

    Claude McKay, a man adopted by the black community of Harlem as a race poet representing African-Americans, did not see himself in this light.  This native-born Jamaican had an entirely different agenda, that being to expose the "mechanically regimented progress of Western Industrialism" (Cooper, 31).  From his childhood until the time he moved to the United States, the world was a very different, accepting place for McKay.  Thus, when this great Harlem Renaissance poet adopted the United States as his new home, there were several issues he wanted to address through his writing.
    Born on September 15, 1890, the youngest of eight children, McKay's life in Jamaica was pleasant on the whole.  While his family did not have an excessive amount of money, they managed a farm and lived comfortably.  McKay's father was a strong Christian, a faith which Claude did not live by.  Still, both respected and cared for one another.  And McKay was able to read a wide variety of literature, from novels and histories, to biblical literature and Shakespeare.  He had access to a library through a family connection, and was educated by his eldest brother, who held a teaching degree.  This was an opportunity most blacks did not have.  Socially, the concept of racism was rather foreign to him as a boy.  He did not suffer ill-effects of racism, and denied any racial tensions at all in Jamaica, though others would later disagree with him.  When describing his life there, McKay said, "I was brought up to use the same language to a white person as a colored" (Tillery, 18).  It was not until he arrived in the United States to go to college that the oppression of American society became a harsh reality.  
    Having already had two volumes of poetry in the Jamaican dialect published in 1912, he was ready to learn more.  Arriving in Charleston, South Carolina later that same year, he attended Tuskegee Institute, a prestigious school for blacks, but could not handle the atmosphere of restriction and oppression, and so he left after six months.  Even there he felt the gap between whites and blacks was incredible, as the issue of racism could not be kept from being exposed to the students.  The "protected" atmosphere did nothing to encourage students' involvement in reshaping society and her ideals.  Rather, he found a community which encouraged living in order to be accepted by white Americans.  He found such a stand to be weak and unappealing.
    McKay moved on to Kansas State College, and after two years there, moved to New York City when one of his literary admirers gave him several thousand dollars out of appreciation for his Jamaican dialect works.  Once in New York, he immersed himself in the black community there.  He married Eulalie Edwars, and became a restauranteur that same summer.  However, within six months, she returned to Jamaica and gave birth to a daughter McKay would never see, while the restaurant business lost all of its money.
    At that point, McKay decided to seriously pursue a writing career.  He started writing poetry in Standard English, a fairly conservative style.  His message was rebellion, despair, and alienation.  America, which he adopted, was not a land of joy for McKay.  He was terribly bitter about the intense hatred he felt over the color of his skin.  Realizing he was a "black poet," and not just a "poet," according to society, McKay struggled to find a balance between "racial and universal notes" in his poetry.  Some of his poems are filled with anger and seem to have a definite African-American slant, while others seem to speak to no particular race at all.
    At the end of World War I, in 1918, McKay embraced Socialism.  He felt American Capitalism exploited the black man, because blacks were forced to prove themselves, yet still were never given half the chance of a white man.  So from 1919 until 1922, he wrote articles for the Liberator, a leftist magazine targeted by the government for conspiracy.  He was bold in his accusations against the American government, and his poetry reflected that view.
    During that time McKay wrote a poem entitled, "If We Must Die," and it enjoyed huge success among the black community because of its apparent display of pride and strength amidst oppression and cruelty.  However, McKay said he wrote it "for all men who were being abused, brutalized, and murdered, whether they were black, brown, yellow, or white" (Tiller, 34).  McKay did not appreciate being the "black representative" for America.  He was afraid the black community would just praise him out of racial patronage, rather than out of appreciation for his poetic/intellectual abilities.
    Then in 1922, after being co-editor of the Liberator with a Marxist, which often raised tensions, two important things happened in McKay's life.  First, his poetic reputation was greatly enhanced when his fourth book of verse was published, entitled Harlem Shadows.  Some said "it contained all the best poems he had written since his first arrival in the U.S. in 1912" (Cooper, 17).  He was proclaimed the best negro poet since Paul Laurence Dunbar.  And black reviewer Walter White called McKay not a great Negro poet, but a great poet.  Second, McKay decided to leave the bitter world of America and move to Russia.  He lived there for twelve years, and enjoyed getting away from the race consciousness that filled black American life.  He became a bit of a celebrity there, and felt proud to be African.  People treated him like a black icon in the flesh.  He was the first black to arrive in Russia since the revolution, and was considered to be a good omen.  However, the Great Depression left him penniless, and he returned to New York in 1934 on borrowed money.  He feared coming back to the harsh conditions in America, and felt as though he had been "expelled from heaven to hell" (Cooper, 35).
    In 1937 he wrote his autobiography, A Long Way From Home, in which he gave an account of his life in America, Europe, and North Africa.  In it he questioned the motives of blacks whom he felt used the Harlem Renaissance to advance their social status among whites.  He saw Harlem as a "vital, but chaotically disorganized community" (Cooper, 30).
    Eventually, McKay was rejected by the Harlem community because he felt blacks could not afford to ally themselves with a party controlled by a capitalist government.  He wanted to see black community development become a form of nationalism.  Those in power in Harlem isolated him by rejecting his ideas which were "out of touch with reality."  So by the age of 50, McKay was a bitter and isolated man, with no money, position, or future.
 
 
 
    Near the end of his life, after being diagnosed with hypertension and dropsy, which weakened his heart due to fluid retention and made him appear rather chubby, he rejected his socialist ideals and joined the Catholic Church in 1944.  He wanted refuge in a devastatingly dehumanized world, and found personal salvation, much to the shock of his contemporaries.  His last compilation of poems written while he was alive was not published until 1953, after his death.  He died in a Chicago hospital on May 22, 1948, from heart failure.
    During his lifetime he made clear his idea that blacks and black artists should not be dependent for their development and growth on either white patronage or passing social fashions.  He never gave up that conviction.  Many of his works became the pacesetters for a new generation of black American poets and novelists.  As the white New Republic reviewer, Robert Littel, said, "his poetry concerning whites and blacks struck hard and pierced deep.  He expressed more than just emotion.  It was something fierce and constant" (Cooper, 18).  Though his life was a struggle against not only white oppression, but also the black community at times, as well as America in general, McKay held fast to his conviction that color-consciousness was a devastating fire which must be put out.

 

Points of Interest

• From 1918-1922 McKay wrote 22 essays, book reviews, and letters for publication.
• During his lifetime, Claude McKay's most widely-acclaimed book was, perhaps, Home to Harlem, which was a national best-seller in 1928.
• In his lifetime, McKay held the following professions:  wheelwright, constable, agriculturist, porter, longshoreman, waiter, poet and novelist.

~ "Nothing that God ever made is the same thing to more than one person.  That is natural.  There is no single face in nature, because every eye that looks upon it, sees it from its own angle.  So every man's spice-box seasons his own food."

                                                                                        ~ Zora Neale Hurston

~ "All my life I have been a troubadour wanderer, nourishing myself mainly on the poetry of existence.  And all I offer here is the distilled poetry of my experience."

                                                                       ~ Claude McKay

Dewey, John.  Introduction.  Selected Poems of Claude McKay.  By Claude McKay.  New York:
    Bookman Associates, 1953.

Harris, Trudier.  The Power of the Porch:  The Storyteller's Craft in Zora Neale Hurston, Gloria
    Naylor, and Randall Kenan.  Athens, GA:  University of Georgia Press, 1996.

Lyons, Mary E.  Sorrow's Kitchen:  The Life and Folklore of Zora Neale Hurston.  New York, NY:
    Nacmillan Publkshing Co., 1990.

Tillery, Tyrone.  Claude McKay:  A Black Poet's Struggle for Identity.  The University of
    Massechusettes Press, 1992.

Wall, Cheryl A.  "Zora neale Hurston:  Changing Her Own Words."  American Novelists Revisited:
    Essays in Feminist Criticism.  Ed. Fritz Fleischmann.  Boston, Massachusettes:  G.K. Hall &
    Co., 1982.  371-393.