Calling her life “a series of wanderings,” African American anthropologist and writer Zora Neale Hurston (1901–1960) wrote to celebrate herself and the fact of being black.

Hurston spoke with humor and a fierce sense of self. “Sometimes, I feel discriminated against, but it does not make me angry,” she said. “It merely astonishes me. How can any deny themselves the pleasure of my company? It’s beyond me.”

Born in Eatonville, Florida, her father served as the town’s mayor and a Baptist minister. With her precious gift for words, she learned to interpret rural folktales with strength and magic.

“Mama exhorted her children at every opportunity to ‘jump at de Sun,’” Hurston wrote in her 1942 autobiography Dust Tracks on a Road. “We might not land on the sun, but at least we would get off the ground.”

Hurston, brash, proud, and opinionated, was one of the most important writers of the 20th century and a celebrated figure of the Harlem Renaissance. Her biographer Robert Hemenway described this complex woman as “flamboyant, yet vulnerable, self-centered, yet kind, a Republican conservative and an early black nationalist.”

Her studies in New Orleans voodoo and research in Haiti and Jamaica informed the folklore collections Mules and Men (1935) and Tell My Horse (1938). She also wrote novels including Jonah’s Gourd Vine (1934) and Their Eyes Were Watching God (1937), works that celebrate identity and reflect her quest for a passionate life.

“Love, I find, is like singing,” she observed. “Everybody can do enough to satisfy themselves, though it may not impress the neighbors as being very much.”