Zora Neale Hurston Died Poor and Forgotten
Quick answer: Zora Neale Hurston died penniless in 1960 and lies in a grave that stayed unmarked until Alice Walker went looking in 1973. The rediscovery story in full.
When Zora Neale Hurston died on 28 January 1960, she was a resident of the St. Lucie County Welfare Home in Fort Pierce, Florida. She had suffered a stroke the previous autumn. There was no money for a funeral; neighbours and friends took up a collection to bury her, and she was laid in the segregated cemetery called the Garden of Heavenly Rest, in a grave that received no headstone. Every one of her books was out of print. The woman who had been among the most published Black women writers in America was, at the end, known locally as a former maid and substitute teacher who was said to have once written things.
It got worse before it got better. After her death, some of her papers and manuscripts were being burned as rubbish when a friend passing by, widely identified as a deputy sheriff named Patrick Duval, put the fire out with a hose. The singed boxes he saved now sit in a university archive and are treated as a national treasure. Between that fire and the archive lies one of the great rediscovery stories in literature, and it turns on a single determined reader.
The brightest talent of the Harlem Renaissance
Hurston grew up in Eatonville, Florida, one of the first incorporated all-Black towns in the United States, a place whose porches, talk and self-government shaped everything she later wrote. Her path to authorship was improbably long: her mother died when she was young, her schooling was interrupted for years, and she famously shaved a decade off her stated age so she could qualify for free public high school as an adult. She went on to Howard University and then to Barnard College, where she was the only Black student, studying anthropology under Franz Boas, the most influential anthropologist of the era.
In 1920s Harlem she was unmissable: brilliant, funny, combative, a collector of stories rather than a striker of poses. With Langston Hughes and Wallace Thurman she launched the short-lived magazine Fire!! in 1926. Her fieldwork in the American South and the Caribbean produced Mules and Men in 1935, a landmark collection of Black Southern folklore gathered from the inside. And in 1937 she published her masterpiece, Their Eyes Were Watching God, a novel she wrote in Haiti in about seven weeks, by her own widely repeated account, while on a research fellowship.
How a major writer disappears
The fall was not one event but a stack of them. Their Eyes Were Watching God received mixed reviews on publication, including a dismissive one from Richard Wright, who accused the book of carrying no political weight; the argument between their two visions of Black writing shadowed her reputation for twenty years. Literary fashion moved towards protest fiction, and Hurston's celebration of Black Southern speech and interior life came to be read, unfairly, as backward-looking.
In 1948 she was falsely accused of a crime against a minor; she was out of the country when the alleged events supposedly occurred and the charge was dismissed, but the newspaper coverage devastated her. Her politics grew idiosyncratic and cost her allies. Publishers declined her later manuscripts. She kept herself alive with whatever came: journalism, a stint as a librarian, substitute teaching, and domestic work. In 1950 a Miami newspaper discovered that the author Zora Neale Hurston was working as a maid on Rivo Alto Island, a story that briefly and painfully made national news. By the late 1950s she was in Fort Pierce, unwell, and writing still, working on a book about Herod the Great that no one wanted.
Waist-high weeds: August 1973
Thirteen years after Hurston's death, a young writer named Alice Walker flew to Florida to find her grave. Walker had encountered Their Eyes Were Watching God while researching a story and had been startled that a book that good, by a writer that important, could simply be gone from print and from memory. Presenting herself as Hurston's niece to smooth the search, she located the Garden of Heavenly Rest and waded into an overgrown field, calling Hurston's name aloud, by her own account, until she stood at a sunken patch she judged to be the grave.
Walker paid for a headstone. It reads, in part, Zora Neale Hurston, A Genius of the South, a phrase borrowed from a Jean Toomer poem, followed by novelist, folklorist, anthropologist. In March 1975 she published the essay In Search of Zora Neale Hurston in Ms. magazine, and the effect was immediate and cumulative: reprints, scholarly editions, biographies, and finally a permanent place on syllabuses. Their Eyes Were Watching God, once out of print, is now among the most taught American novels of the twentieth century.
The turn, honestly weighed
It would be comfortable to say the work simply triumphed, but the truth is more useful. The work was necessary and not sufficient. Hurston's revival required a reader with standing and stamina, a magazine willing to run the essay, and a moment, the mid-1970s flowering of Black women's writing, that was ready to claim an ancestor. Luck and timing did real work here, and honesty requires saying so.
But notice what luck had to work with. Hurston had published books, real, finished, findable books, and enough of them that one could ambush Alice Walker decades later. She had also, decisively, been saved from the fire by one friend's choice on an ordinary afternoon. Every part of the miracle depended on the work existing in durable, public form. Obscurity was reversible because publication is permanent in a way reputation is not.
What a working writer can take from this
First: reputation is weather, not geology. Hurston did nothing to deserve the eclipse; fashions changed, politics shifted, a false accusation landed, and the same books that were ignored in 1955 were revered by 1980 without a comma changing. If your work is being overlooked, the explanation may genuinely have nothing to do with its quality. That thought is not consolation; it is an accurate model of how literary attention behaves.
Second: write the thing only you can write, because that is the only kind of work that gets rediscovered. Hurston's insistence on Eatonville's voices, against the explicit advice of her era's tastemakers, is precisely what made her indispensable later. The safe, current-fashion version of her books would have stayed buried. And put the work where readers can find it: in print, in magazines, in contests, in the world. A poem that leaves your notebook has a future; Writory's monthly contest, which scores every entry it receives, exists so that no piece has to wait thirteen years for its first serious reader.
Where to start with her work
Their Eyes Were Watching God is the essential book: read it for Janie's arc, but study it for the narration, which slides between standard English and Eatonville dialect so fluently that the technique has its own scholarly literature. Then Mules and Men, the folklore collection, which shows where the novel's voices were gathered. Her autobiography Dust Tracks on a Road is unreliable, self-mythologising and completely alive, which makes it perfect reading for anyone thinking about how writers construct themselves.
What poets can take from this
- Publish in durable places; a printed book or archived magazine can be rediscovered, but an unshared manuscript needs a miracle and a hose.
- Write in your own idiom even when fashion frowns; the unfashionable specific outlives the fashionable general.
- Keep copies of everything and tell someone where they are; Hurston's surviving papers exist because one person acted quickly.
- Do not read a cold market as a final judgment; Hurston's books improved not at all between 1955 and 1980, only the readers changed.
- Champion the overlooked writers you love in print; rediscovery always begins with one reader saying so publicly.
- Finish and release the strange project; the safe version of your book is the one nobody will come looking for.
Try it yourself
Write a poem spoken by an overgrown cemetery in Florida to the visitor who is walking through it, calling a name.
Questions
How did Zora Neale Hurston die?
She suffered a stroke in late 1959 and died on 28 January 1960 in the St. Lucie County Welfare Home in Fort Pierce, Florida. Friends and neighbours collected money for her funeral, and she was buried in an unmarked grave in the Garden of Heavenly Rest cemetery.
Who rediscovered Zora Neale Hurston?
The writer Alice Walker led the revival. In August 1973 she travelled to Fort Pierce, located what she judged to be the unmarked grave, and paid for a headstone calling Hurston A Genius of the South. Her 1975 Ms. magazine essay In Search of Zora Neale Hurston brought the work back into print and into classrooms.
How long did Their Eyes Were Watching God take to write?
By Hurston's own widely repeated account, she wrote the novel in about seven weeks in Haiti in 1936, while there on a Guggenheim fellowship collecting folklore. It was published in 1937 to mixed reviews and is now one of the most taught American novels.
By the Writory editorial team, reviewed by working poets. Updated September 2026.
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