ENG330: Their Eyes Were Watching God

From "Official Website of Zora Neale Hurston."

New York Times video about Hurston and her role with the Works Progress Administration collecting stories in Florida.

Brief bio of Zora Neale Hurston.

This Episode Highlights the life and works of Writer, Ethnologist and Folklorist Zora Neale Hurston. The series, African American Folklorists, highlights African American writers, folklorists, ethnologist, composers and playwriters, that documented, described and flat out canvased the Black experience through their works, connecting the dots between the Blues, Spirituals, Work songs, Prison songs and the social and economic climate of Blacks in America.

"Celebrated author Zora Neale Hurston’s papers were almost lost forever. Now they're protected in the University of Florida George A. Smathers Libraries. Manuscript archivist Florence Turcotte details the items in the library collection, which is available for viewing at UF, and UF Professor of African American Studies Patricia Hilliard Nunn discusses the impact of Hurston’s works."

"ZORA NEALE HURSTON: JUMP AT THE SUN intersperses insights from leading scholars and rare footage of the rural South (some of it shot by Zora herself) with re-enactments of a revealing 1943 radio interview. Hurston biographer, Cheryl Wall, traces Zora's unique artistic vision back to her childhood in Eatonville, Florida, the first all-black incorporated town in the U.S. There Zora was surrounded by proud, self-sufficient, self-governing black people, deeply immersed in African American folk traditions. Her father, a Baptist preacher, carpenter and three times mayor, reminded Zora every Sunday morning that ordinary black people could be powerful poets. Her mother encouraged her to "jump at de' sun," never to let being black and a woman stand in the way of her dreams." 2008. PEA login required

"This illuminating biography of Hurston—a compelling story of a free spirit who achieved national prominence yet died in obscurity—examines the rich legacy of her writings, which include Mules and Men, Their Eyes Were Watching God, Tell My Horse, and Dust Tracks on a Road. Interviews with Lucy Anne Hurston, Zora’s niece and author of the biography Speak, So You Can Speak Again, and with Henry Louis Gates Jr., W. E. B. DuBois Professor of the Humanities at Harvard University, are featured." Films for the Humanities, 2005. PEA login required.