Seraph on the Suwanee, published in 1948, was Hurston's last novel, and it was far from successful. The failure of the novel, however, was not the worst disaster for Hurston that year. In September, a month before the novel was published, she was wrongfully accused of sexually abusing a mentally handicapped 10-year-old boy. She was not even in New York City at the time the alleged act supposedly took place. Although the charges were false, and she was exonerated, the damage had been done rather viciously by a Harlem newspaper that had printed information leaked from confidential court records by a court employee.
Hurston returned to Florida to work at whatever jobs she could find and to continue to do freelance writing for a variety of publications. She also did research for a novel that would be based on the life of Herod. For a while, she worked as a maid, and she was also a librarian at a military installation, making $1.88 an hour. Characteristically, Hurston did not get along with the other employees, and she was soon fired.
The dusty Florida road that Hurston traveled was nearing an end, a point at which the traveler sees the sign "No Outlet." In her later years, she gained weight, and she suffered a stroke in 1959. She died on January 28, 1960, in the St. Lucie County Welfare Home, in Fort Pierce. Her family, friends, and neighbors took up a collection to pay for her funeral and burial in an unmarked grave in the black section of the Garden of the Heavenly Rest, a segregated cemetery.
In 1973, novelist Alice Walker set out to search for Hurston's grave. As nearly as she could determine, she found it and had a plain, gray headstone placed on it, engraved with a phrase taken from one of the poems of Jean Toomer, "A Genius of the South." The resurgence of interest in the work of Zora Neale Hurston can be largely attributed to the attention that Walker has given it.
