Harlem+Renaissance

The Harlem Renaissance was just as the name implies. Harlem has always been a bastion of black culture, and renaissance, French for rebirth, shows the reworking and awakening of the ideals and various art forms. The Harlem Renaissance explodes with colorful passion and right with it was Zora Neal Hurston!

In 1921, her first short story "John Redding Goes to Sea" that was set in Eatonville was published in the Howard literary magazine The Stylus. In the years that followed she contributed several more stories to various magazines. One of these "Spunk" was published in the black journal Opportunity. Her work began to catch the attention to prominent poets such as Langston Hughes and Countee Cullen, both of whom were active in a nascent artistic movement called the Harlem Renaissance. Zora transferred to Barnard College, where she was offered a scholarship in anthropology. And being in New York City she quickly became a recognized member of the movement.

The Harlem Renaissance was a period during which black artists broke with the traditional dialectal works and imitating white writers to explore black culture and express pride in their race. Zora and her stories about Eatonville became a major force in shaping these ideals. Their Eyes Were Watching God, a novel of Hurston’s, was a dominant work that showed the journey of a slave and thus connecting with the roots of black culture. Hurston also relied heavily on the southern speech patterns and dialects in her novels. At first this was perceived as a detriment to the movement, but more recently her choice to include the language of the former slave was praised for its artful capture of Negro culture!