“Janie knew that God tore down the old world every evening and built a new one by sun-up. It was wonderful to see it take form with the sun and emerge from the gray dust of its making.”

American writer, anthropologist, folklorist, and documentary filmmaker

Zora Neale Hurston was an American writer, anthropologist, folklorist, and documentary filmmaker. She is best known for work that portrayed racial struggle in the early 20th-century American South, and for her landmark novel Their Eyes Were Watching God, published in 1937. Hurston also wrote more than 50 short stories, plays, an autobiography, ethnographies, and many essays. Her research on Hoodoo and Caribbean Vodou, including Tell My Horse, helped shape later thinking in anthropology and ethnography, while her work also bridged literature and Africana Studies.