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Zora Neale Hurston (Eatonville, Florida January 7, 1891 - January 28, 1960) was an American folklorist anthropologist and writer and one of the most important figures of the Harlem Renaissance. His literary work, widely recognized today, was not appreciated while alive and Hurston died in poverty. His best known work is Their Eyes Were Watching God (1937), a work of semi-biographical content.
In 1936, Hurston obtained a Guggenheim research grant to study the practice of Obeah (Voodoo, Santeria) in the English Caribbean. He travels to Jamaica and Haiti, where he writes Their Eyes Were watching God, because he finds in this environment of rural folklore the inspiration and energy to recover from a failed relationship with a man younger than her, to whom left behind to continue his investigation, His eyes were looking at God dealing with a very similar situation. He lived in the Caribbean for two years and the information he gathers there, description of customs and superstitions, recording of songs, jokes, games and photographs of dances, appears in his second folklore compilation, Tell My Horse (1938). The study on the practice of Voodoo and Judú (hoodoo) in the English Caribbean is transformed into much more from Hurston's already more expert hand. Treats Voodoo as a serious religious practice, something that was not done at the time, originally from Africa and that exists intermingled with Christianity. Both in his folklore compilations and in his novels and stories, Hurston always makes an effort to shape his characters' way of speaking, his dialects, which makes his reading difficult, but at the same time gives his texts the “taste of reality ”missing in some of his contemporaries. This difference is based on his own writing style. Hurston, over the years, gives preference to the description of his characters through his actions, instead of opting for descriptions made by the narrator or other characters. On the other hand, the theme that Hurston's work tends to deal with is more intimate, in the sense that he deals with relations between members of an African-American community (usually Eatonville) rather than in relations between the black man and the White. The text of Tell My Horse is an example of the mixture of styles that characterizes its texts: anthropology and fiction, political criticism, and photography, etc.
