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Zora Neale Hurston
Novelist, folklorist & Harlem Renaissance voice
She wrote Black life as it was lived — not as protest, not as apology — and the world took sixty years to catch up.
The rise
Raised in Eatonville, Florida — one of the first all-Black incorporated towns in America — Hurston studied anthropology under Franz Boas at Barnard and became a central figure of the Harlem Renaissance. Her fieldwork across the South and the Caribbean preserved Black folklore and hoodoo traditions.