Zora Neale Hurston (January 7, 1891 – January 28, 1960) was an American folklorist and author during the time of the Harlem Renaissance, best known for the 1937 novel Their Eyes Were Watching God. Background and career Hurston was "purposefully inconsistent in the birth dates she dispensed during her lifetime, most of which were fictitious."Robert E. Hemenway, Zora Neale Hurston: A Literary Biography (Urbana, Ill: University of Illinois Press, 1977), page 13. For a long time, scholars believed that she was born in Eatonville, Florida in 1901. In the 1990s, a filmmaker established that Hurston had been born in Notasulga, Alabama and moved to Eatonville at a young age, spending her childhood there. It was Eatonville, the first all-Black town to be incorporated in the United States, that inspired her imagination. Early Life Hurston's parents were Lucy Ann Potts, a