Zora Neale Hurston Listens
Written by Studio AM.
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Zora Neale Hurston grew up in Eatonville, Florida, a self-governing Black town where stories, songs and conversation were part of daily life. In the 1920s, she studied anthropology in New York, including work with Franz Boas. She brought that training to the communities and traditions she knew.
Hurston gathered folktales, work songs, sermons and accounts of everyday life in the American South and the Caribbean. Her fieldwork involved listening, asking questions and joining in. Recordings preserve her own performances as well as material she collected from others. The words mattered, but so did rhythm, delivery and the situation in which a story was told.
She also used regional Black speech in her fiction, including Their Eyes Were Watching God, published in 1937. Rather than treating local storytelling as quaint decoration, she made it central to her writing. Some critics objected to her style or wanted a different kind of political message.
Hurston's reputation declined late in her life, and she died in 1960 with little money. Later writers, including Alice Walker, helped renew interest in her books. Her work offers both imaginative fiction and records of spoken traditions that might otherwise have been lost.
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Questions
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Question 1 of 4
Which statement best expresses the main idea of the passage?
The answer is B: Hurston made Black spoken traditions central to her research and fiction.
Her fieldwork preserved speech and performance, and those traditions also shaped her fiction.
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Question 2 of 4
Which novel does the passage name?
The answer is A: Their Eyes Were Watching God
The third paragraph names Their Eyes Were Watching God and gives its publication year as 1937.
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Question 3 of 4
What might a sound recording preserve that a written transcript alone could miss?
The answer is D: The rhythm and delivery of the performance.
The passage says rhythm and delivery matter alongside words. A recording can retain features of the voice that a transcript may not show.
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Question 4 of 4
In the passage, 'quaint' means:
The answer is C: attractively old-fashioned or unusual
'Quaint decoration' suggests something charming but treated as secondary. Hurston's work instead made the storytelling central.
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