From the time Hurston submitted her first story, “John Redding Goes to Sea,” in 1921 to The Stylus, Howard University’s literary club, until decades later, when she wrote a query letter to a publisher in the quavering hand of an old woman, Zora Hurston was a writer. If Hurston could have spoken to Alice Walker as Walker searched for her grave, Hurston might have said, “Remember me as a writer.”
The Renaissance Writer
From Dust Tracks on a Road, we learn that Hurston gave the Howard University campus newspaper, The Hill Top, the name it still carries. At Howard, she became part of an exclusive literary group that included prolific writer and renowned educator Dr. Alain Locke. After her story, “Drenched in Light,” was submitted to The Stylus, she sent it to Charles S. Johnson in New York City. As editor of Opportunity, he was looking for young writers, was impressed, and published it. Johnson also published another of Hurston’s stories, “Spunk,” and these two appearances in print fueled her desire to go to New York City and try her luck as a writer.
Only someone like Hurston would have had the courage to arrive in New York with no job and only a dollar and a half in her purse. She had friends, though. Earlier, she had met Johnson and his wife at Howard, and she paid tribute to Johnson and his support of young writers in Dust Tracks. She wrote that Johnson, through his editorship of Opportunity and his support of young black writers, really started the so-called Negro Renaissance.
The Negro Renaissance occurred during the 1920s, with Harlem known as its “culture capital,” according to James Weldon Johnson. Since the community of Harlem in New York City became recognized as the center of the Negro Renaissance Movement, many refer to it also as the Harlem Renaissance Movement, sometimes also referred to as the New Negro Movement. During this time period, writers, poets, artists, musicians, and dancers gathered to share their talents and to tell the stories of the Negro experience. Such well-known figures as Johnson, Claude McKay, Countee Cullen, Langston Hughes, and Wallace Thurman flourished during the Harlem Renaissance. Hurston is associated with the Harlem Renaissance because she was in New York City during that time period. The Great Depression caused many of the writers and artists to leave Harlem to find other sources of income.
In New York, Hurston made friends easily, and it wasn’t long before she was part of literary circles that included Margaret Walker, Claude McKay, Arna Bontemps, Aaron Douglas, Jean Toomer, and Langston Hughes. Her involvement with these writers and artists, as well as editors and publishers in the Harlem Renaissance movement, quickly earned her a reputation as an entertaining storyteller, sometimes to the despair of these new Negro artistic and literary elite, who often found her earthy style displeasing. Hurston didn’t care; she kept on being herself. It wasn’t long before Fannie Hurst, a successful and popular novelist of that era, offered Hurston a job, and another benevolent friend helped her to get a scholarship to Barnard.
