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."
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.
