Zora Neale Hurston was born on Jan. 7, 1891, in Notasulga, Alabama, and moved with her family to Eatonville, Florida, while still a toddler, and her writings reveal no recollection of her Alabama beginnings because Eatonville was always home to her. Established in 1887 near Orlando, Eatonville was the nation’s first incorporated Black township, a rural community Hurston described as “a city of five lakes, three croquet courts, three hundred brown skins, three hundred good swimmers, plenty guavas, two schools and no jailhouse.” There she was never indoctrinated in inferiority: she saw Black men, including her father, John Hurston, formulating the laws that governed the town; Black women, including her mother, Lucy Potts Hurston, directing the Christian curricula in the Sunday Schools of its two churches; and Black men and women on the porch of the village store passing worlds through their mouths in colorful, engaging stories. By 1935, after graduating from Bernard College in 1928, she had published several short stories and articles, the novel Jonah’s Gourd Vine, and the well-received collection of black Southern folklore Mules and Men. The late 1930s and early ’40s marked the zenith of her career, with the publication of Their Eyes Were Watching God in 1937, Tell My Horse in 1938, Moses, Man of the Mountain in 1939, and her autobiography Dust Tracks on a road in 1942, which finally brought her the acclaim that had long eluded her. In 1942 she was also profiled in Who’s Who in America, Current Biography and Twentieth Century Authors, and she later published Seraph on the Suwanee in 1948.