Hurston's Jumping At The Sun

Zora Neale Hurston (1891-1960) was a remarkable African American woman writer in the 1920s and 1930s, a major figure of the Harlem Renaissance. Both Hurston's life-style and her fictions were sharply different from those of the other black writers of her contemporaries, which put her at the center of controversy. Hurston's views on race and gender seemed to be unacceptable to her contemporaries. Because not only Hurston suffered criticism from those black male writers like Richard Wright, but also Hurston's works were buried in oblivion for almost three decades. Along with a rising black feminist movement in America in 1970s, Hurston was rediscovered and regarded by black feminists as the 'canonical black foremother'. This recognition thus restored Hurston's place in the American literary landscape. Today, at the age of globalization and multiculturalism, Hurston's attitude toward race and gender more than fifty years ago has become not only more acceptable and understandable. Therefore, more and more critics have turn their eyes to Hurston and more and more profound articles, essays and books on Hurston have appeared. Alice Walker once said that 'Zora Neale Hurston was before her time—in intellectual circles—in the life style she chose'.The life style Hurston chose was ahead of her era. In her lifetime, Hurston had two marriages and a lot of affairs. But none of them lasted a long time. Hurston spent most of her life in single in fields in doing research on African American folklore and on her fiction writing. According to Hurston's own explanation in her autobiography Dust Tracks on a Road and to Hurston's biographer Robert...