Zora Neale Hurston Died a Welfare Case and Was Buried in an Unmarked Grave

Zora Neale Hurston published Their Eyes Were Watching God in 1937, writing the first draft in seven weeks while on an anthropological field trip to Haiti. The novel sold modestly and received mixed reviews; Richard Wright, then the dominant Black literary voice in America, called it politically evasive. The book went out of print.

Hurston spent the 1940s writing journalism, a memoir, and a biblical novel, none of which recaptured her earlier momentum. Her anthropological work — years spent collecting folklore and music in the American South and the Caribbean under the mentorship of Franz Boas at Columbia — was largely overlooked in the literary world that would have made her famous. By 1950 she was working as a maid in Rivo Alto, Florida, a suburb of Miami. A local paper ran a story with the headline: "Noted Author Working As Maid."

She spent her final decade in Fort Pierce, Florida, writing when she could, suffering from hypertension and poor health, intermittently on welfare. She died of a stroke on January 28, 1960. The county paid for her funeral. She was buried in an unmarked grave in the Garden of Heavenly Rest Cemetery, a segregated burial ground in Fort Pierce.

In 1973, Alice Walker drove to Fort Pierce to find the grave. She described the search in an essay for Ms. magazine — the cemetery was overgrown, the grave lost among weeds. Walker placed a granite marker inscribed "Zora Neale Hurston / 'A Genius of the South' / Novelist, Folklorist, Anthropologist." The essay helped restart serious attention to Hurston's work. By the 1980s, Their Eyes Were Watching God was back in print and on university syllabi across the country.