She grew up in America's first all-black incorporated town, Eatonville, Fla., from which she drew in her fiction. Today, the small city proudly proclaims it was "authenticated by the works of Zora Neale Hurston, a writer, anthropologist, a black woman."
Hurston's schoolteacher mother was an inspiration to her, pushing her to "jump at de sun." After her mother died and her preacher father remarried, she left home at 14, putting herself through school at Morgan Academy in Baltimore and Howard University in Washington, D.C., working at various jobs including manicurist and maid.
