Zora Neale Hurston - Episode 3 African American Folklorists, Writers and the Blues

Published by

Lamont Jack Pearley

Talking Bout The Blues Video series African American Folklorist, Writers and the Blues. This series highlights African American writers, folklorists, ethnologist, composers and playwriters, that documented, described and flat out canvased the Black experience through their works, connecting the dots between the Blues, Spirituals, Work songs, Prison songs and the social and economic climate of Blacks in America.

This Episode Highlights the life and works of Writer, Ethnologist and Folklorist Zora Neale Hurston. A stable of the South, a friend and colleague of Langston Hughes, Ethel Waters, Sterling Brown and many more. She was a dominant voice of the Harlem Renaissance , and the African American Legacy as a whole.

Zora Neale Hurston is considered one of the pre-eminent writers of twentieth-century African-American literature. Hurston was closely associated with the Harlem Renaissance and has influenced such writers as Ralph Ellison, Toni Morrison, Gayle Jones, Alice Walker, and Toni Cade Bambara.

In 1975, Ms. Magazine published Alice Walker’s essay, “In Search of Zora Neale Hurston” reviving interest in the author. Hurston’s four novels and two books of folklore resulted from extensive anthropological research and have proven invaluable sources on the oral cultures of African America.

Through her writings, Robert Hemenway wrote in The Harlem Renaissance Remembered, Hurston “helped to remind the Renaissance–especially its more bourgeois members–of the richness in the racial heritage.”
http://zoranealehurston.com/index.html