Having to do with the established form for the ceremonies or rites of religious worship liturgical 2. the first, or original, of anything prototype

Not a 100 but will help.

(January 7, 1891 – January 28, 1960)  

Hurston was born in Notasulga, Alabama, and moved with her family to Eatonville, Florida, in 1894.

Student at Barnard College and Columbia University.

Hurston was the sixth of eight children of John Hurston and Lucy Ann Hurston (née Potts). All of her four grandparents had been born into slavery. Her father was a Baptist preacher and sharecropper, who later became a carpenter, and her mother was a school teacher.

Wrote fiction about contemporary issues in the black community and became a central figure of the Harlem Renaissance.

Jonah's Gourd Vine (1934); Their Eyes Were Watching God (1937); and Moses, Man of the Mountain (1939)

Helped other African Americans to embrace, learn, and write about their culture.

It was unliked by most, even those in the Harlem Art movement.

Miss Hurston seems to have no desire whatsoever to move in the direction of serious fiction… [She] can write; but her prose is cloaked in that facile sensuality that has dogged Negro expression since the days of Phyllis Wheatley... Her characters eat and laugh and cry and work and kill; they swing like a pendulum eternally in that safe and narrow orbit in which America likes to see the Negro live: between laughter and tears.

Walker published "In Search of Zora Neale Hurston" in the March 1975 issue of Ms. magazine, reviving interest in Hurston's work. In addition, the rise of a generation of new African-American women authors, such as Maya Angelou, Toni Morrison, and Walker, stimulated interest in Hurston. Their works also are centered on African-American experiences and include, but do not necessarily focus upon, racial struggle.

Her importance in the Harlem Renaissance and her paving the way for more black authors to come.

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