Life, death and the resurrection of the Harlem Renaissance femme terrible

The article deals with Afro-American literary author and anthropologist Zora Neale Hurston and her place in the Harlem Renaissance. It focuses on the reasons why she was not recognized during her lifetime. Analysing her novel Their Eyes Were Watching God, it establishes what was it that made the Afro-American authors from the 1970s and 1980s adopt her as their literary predecessor and inscribe her in the literary canon. The article states that her literature is written from a feminist perspective and deals with the lives of Afro-American women without constantly positioning them in the context of racial difficulties of the period, as was done by her predominately male literary contemporaries.