Novels, including
Their Eyes Were Watching God (1937), and nonfiction writings of American folklorist
Zora Neale Hurston give detailed accounts of African American life in the South.
In 1925, Hurston, one of the leaders of the literary renaissance, happening in Harlem, produced the short-lived literary magazine
Fire!! alongside
Langston Hughes and
Wallace Thurman shortly before she entered Barnard College. This literary movement developed into the Harlem renaissance.
Hurston applied her Barnard ethnographic training to document African American folklore in her critically acclaimed book
Mules and Men alongside fiction
Their Eyes Were Watching God . She also assembled a folk-based performance dance group that recreated her Southern tableau with one performance on Broadway.
People awarded a Guggenheim fellowship to Hurston to travel to Haiti and conduct research on conjure in 1937. Her significant work ably broke into the secret societies and exposed their use of drugs to create the Vodun trance, also a subject of study for fellow dancer-anthropologist
Katherine Dunham, then at the University of Chicago.
In 1954, the
Pittsburgh Courier assigned Hurston, unable to sell her fiction, to cover the small-town murder trial of Ruby McCollum, the prosperous black wife of the local lottery racketeer, who had killed a racist white doctor. Hurston also contributed to
Woman in the Suwanee County Jail , a book by journalist and civil rights advocate
William Bradford Huie.