Zora Neale Hurston: Zora Comes Alive

A drama set in the 1920s, where free-spirited Janie Crawford’s search for happiness leads her through several different marriages, challenging the mores of her small town. Starring Halle Berry, Ruben Santiago-Hudson, Michael Ealy, Terrence Howard, Nicki Micheaux, Lorraine Toussaint, Ruby Dee, Gabriel Casseus, Artel Kayàru, Kevin Daniels, Henry Brown. Introduction by Oprah Winfrey.

A national radio documentary exploring the life and works of the Florida folklorist and celebrated writer of the Harlem Renaissance. The production featured Hurston biographers Valerie Boyd, Carla Kaplan, and Robert Hemenway, as well as music from the era and dramatic readings by actress Ruby Dee. Hosted by actress Vanessa Williams, syndicated by Public Radio International (PRI) February 2007.

Zora Neale Hurston: Jump at the Sun (84:00)

Zora Neale Hurston, trailblazing novelist and pioneering anthropologist, is responsible for establishing African-American vernacular as a valid voice in literature. With the rediscovery by the modern academic community of Their Eyes Were Watching God, Hurston became one of the first black women to enter the American literary canon. This definitive film biography portrays Hurston in all her complexity: gifted, flamboyant, controversial, and always fiercely original. The program intersperses insights from scholars and rare footage of the rural South (some of it shot by Hurston herself) with reenactments of a revealing 1943 radio interview—and examines her life both as a writer and as an ethnographer.

"I have the strength to walk my own path, no matter how hard, in my search for reality, and not cling to the splendid wagon of desperate illusions.” A writer of novels, short stories, folktales, plays, and essays, Zora Neale Hurston combined a hunger for research and a desire to penetrate the deepest of popular beliefs with a truly exquisite narrative talent. This illuminating biography of Hurston—a compelling story of a free spirit who achieved national prominence yet died in obscurity—examines the rich legacy of her writings, which include Mules and Men, Their Eyes Were Watching God, Tell My Horse, and Dust Tracks on a Road. Interviews with Lucy Anne Hurston, Zora’s niece and author of the biography Speak, So You Can Speak Again, and with Henry Louis Gates Jr., W. E. B. DuBois Professor of the Humanities at Harvard University, are featured. The program amply demonstrates that Hurston truly had, as it said in her high school yearbook, “A heart with room for every joy.” A Films for the Humanities & Sciences Production.

Zora Neale Hurston and Thomas Wolfe were two wildly talented Southern writers who moved North in order to write. Hurston's writing is enormously energetic. Thomas Wolfe collected his raw materials from the residents of his mother's boarding house.