“When God had made The Man, he made him out of stuff that sung all the time and glittered all over. Some angels got jealous and chopped him into millions of pieces, but still he glittered and hummed. So they beat him down to nothing but sparks but each little spark had a shine and a song. So they covered each one over with mud. And the lonesomeness in the sparks make them hunt for one another.”

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.