Zora Neale Hurston was an influential author, folklorist, and anthropologist during the Harlem Renaissance. She explored black culture through her short stories and novels, as well as through anthropological fieldwork. Her most famous work, Their Eyes Were Watching God, is considered a seminal work of American literature. Hurston's candid autobiography Dust Tracks on a Road recounts her rise from poverty to prominence as a leading figure of the Harlem Renaissance.

1. Zora NEALE HURSTON: Literature At Its Best By: Wilesha Graham

3. ZORA NEALE HURSTON’S ACCOMPLISHMENTS: A novelist, folklorist, and anthropologist, Zora Neale Hurston was the prototypical authority on black culture from the Harlem Renaissance. In this artistic movement of the 1920s black artists moved from traditional dialectical works and imitation of white writers to explore their own culture and affirm pride in their race. Zora Neale Hurston pursued this objective by combining literature with anthropology. She first gained attention with her short stories such as "John Redding Goes to Sea" and "Spunk" which appeared in black literary magazines.

4. Robert Hemenway wrote, Hurston "helped to remind the Renaissance especially its more bourgeois members of the richness in the racial heritage”.

5. After several years of anthropological research financed through grants and fellowships, Zora Neale Hurston's first novel Jonah's Gourd Vine was published in 1934 to critical success. In 1935, her book Mules and Men, which investigated voodoo practices in black communities in Florida and New Orleans, also brought her kudos.

6. "There is no book more important to me than this one." - Alice Walker "THEIR EYES WERE WATCHING GOD belongs in the same category with [the works of] William Faulkner, F. Scott Fitzgerald, and Ernest Hemingway, that of enduring American literature." - Saturday Review

7. First published in 1942 at the height of her popularity, Dust Tracks on a Road is Zora Neale Hurston’s candid, funny, bold, and poignant autobiography, an imaginative and exuberant account of her rise from childhood poverty in the rural South to a prominent place among the leading artists and intellectuals of the Harlem Renaissance.

8. “I do not belong to that sobbing school of Negrohood who hold that nature somehow has given them a lowdown dirty deal”. – Zora Neale Hurston

9. References "Gale - Free Resources - Black History - Biographies - Zora Neale Hurston." Gale - Home. Web. 08 May 2011. <http://www.gale.cengage.com/free_resources/bhm/bio/hurston_z.htm>. The Official Zora Neale Hurston Website." Zora Neale Hurston. Web. 08 May 2011. <http://www.zoranealehurston.com/index.html>.