Gianfranco Zola. Neil Heston To Alice. Walker's Influence

Zora Neale Hurston and Alice Walker are two important female writers of twentieth Century in African American literary history. Hurston is known as classical writer of the black female literature and African American literature. She uncloses the African American women’s living predicament under double oppression from her unique perspective, and explores the effective ways to obtain their liberation, and this finding has aroused the general attention to the black female survival issues.At the same time, she reproduces the realistic United States Southern black people’s honest, self-sufficient life with her beautiful writing. She writes the healthy image of blacks and demonstrates the unique charm of traditional black culture, creating a unique writing pattern of blacks in the history of the African American literary writing. It has produced far-reaching effect on many writers of later generations. Especially, Alice Walker regards her as her "mother of literature", and she continues to consider writing the black female survival integrity as her own goals, and actively builds black women’s new images.In addition, Hurston writes for the black cultural tradition, expressing praise to and pride in her own national culture, and confidence in her black identity. At the same time, she makes a more objective survey of the national cultural abuses in tradition, calling people to selectively inherit the tradition, so as to make the black culture remain invincible in the confrontation with the white culture.This thesis makes an in-depth discussion on the great influence of Hurston over Walker based on Hurston’s Their Eyes Were Watching God and Walker’s the color Purple. This thesis consists of three parts, the first chapter expounds Hurston and Walker’s pursuit of survival integrity of black women based on Walker’s feminism and social gender theory, suggesting both of them realized the plight of double oppression of black women at different levels and actively explored the effective guidance for black women to obtain complete survival. The second chapter explores Hurston’s influence on Walker from black cultural concept according to the black cultural tradition, indicating that Walker’s cultural concept is the inheritance and development of Hurston’s. The third chapter comprehensively researches the influence of Hurston on Walker and Walker’s "looking for Zora" trip in the spirit and the reality from the perspective of historical time. Obviously, Hurston fully deserves the honor of "literary mother Walker". Walker is directly affected by Hurston either from the caring for black women’s survival situation or view of traditional black culture. And on this basis, Walker has a more profound understanding and clearer solution from these aspects.