Creator / Zora Neale Hurston

"But in the main, I feel like a brown bag of miscellany propped against a wall. Against a wall in company with other bags, white, red and yellow. Pour out the contents, and there is discovered a jumble of small things priceless and worthless... In your hand is the brown bag. On the ground before you is the jumble it held—so much like the jumble in the bags, could they be emptied, that all might be dumped in a single heap and the bags refilled without altering the content of any greatly. A bit of colored glass more or less would not matter. Perhaps that is how the Great Stuffer of Bags filled them in the first place—who knows?"

— "How It Feels to Be Colored Me"

Zora Neale Hurston (Jan. 7, 1891 — Jan. 28, 1960) was a Harlem Renaissance fiction writer, essayist, playwright and historian, most known for her musings on and chronicles of the African-American experience between Reconstruction and the Civil Rights Era. Born in Alabama, Hurston spent most of her childhood in the black town of Eatonville, Florida, which later became the setting for many of her stories. At the age of eleven, following her mother's death, she stayed with various relatives until attending Howard University in the 1920s. She subsequently studied at Barnard University and moved to Harlem in 1925 to join the Harlem Renaissance community of writers and musicians there.In 1927, though, Hurston returned to Eatonville with a fellowship from Barnard to study the town's oral traditions. The warts-and-all portrayal of life in her hometown not only made up the bulk of her nonfiction, aside from an autobiography titled Dust Tracks on a Road, but characterized her short stories. Another mark of her style is images of grand processes on cosmic scales intertwining with human events to convey the significance of moments in her characters' lives.

The following works by Zora Neale Hurston have their own trope pages:

• Their Eyes Were Watching God (1937)
• Moses, Man of the Mountain (1939)

Other works by Hurston contain examples of the following tropes:

• Bedroom Adultery Scene: Portrayed through Joe's eyes in "The Gilded Six-Bits."
• Brass Balls: Spunk in the short story bearing his name.
• Broken Bird: Delia in "Sweat."
• Chubby Chaser: In "Sweat," Sykes "hates skinny women" and cheats on his wife with a fat woman named Bertha.
• Fat Bastard: Otis P. Slemmons in "The Gilded Six-Bits."
• Frying Pan of Doom: Delia threatens Sykes with one in "Sweat."
• Funetik Aksent: Hurston captures the dialect of the residents of Eatonville, Florida phonetically.
• Hoist by Their Own Petard: The ending of "Sweat." Sykes is lethally bitten by a rattlesnake that he brought home to terrorize Delia.
• Killing in Self-Defense: Spunk does this to Joe Kanty.
• Murder by Inaction: In "Sweat," Delia sees her abusive husband get bitten by a rattlesnake and just stands there, letting him die. Downplayed by the narration saying the nearest hospital that could treat him is too distant to get there in time.
• Oops! I Forgot I Was Married: In "Black Death," Beau seduces Docia Boger, gets her pregnant, and then tells her he is already married before abandoning her.
• Shown Their Work: Hurston did a ton of research on folklore, and her research on Hoodoo went so far as to getting initiated into it, which involved her lying naked and face down on a bed in a room for three days with only a pitcher of water for sustenance—which the illustrator of her book Mules and Men duly depicted.
• Smug Snake: Otis P. Slemmons in "The Gilded Six-Bits;" Beau Diddley in "Black Death."
• "The Reason You Suck" Speech: Delivered to Sykes by Delia in "Sweat."
• Why Did It Have to Be Snakes?: Delia is terrified of snakes, a fear her abusive husband Sykes exploits to torment her.
• Witch Doctor: Morgan in "Black Death" is Eatonville's resident practitioner of hoodoo, who mainly traffics in curses of disease or social misfortune.