Zora Neale Hurston was an American writer, anthropologist, folklorist, and documentary filmmaker. She portrayed racial struggles in the early-20th-century American South and published research on Hoodoo and Caribbean Vodou. The most popular of her four novels is Their Eyes Were Watching God, published in 1937. She also wrote more than 50 short stories, plays, an autobiography, ethnographies, and many essays.

Hurston traveled extensively in the Caribbean and the American South and immersed herself in local cultural practices to conduct her anthropological research.

During a period of financial and medical difficulties, Hurston was forced to enter St. Lucie County Welfare Home, where she had a stroke. She died of hypertensive heart disease on January 28, 1960, and was buried at the Garden of Heavenly Rest in Fort Pierce, Florida. Her remains were in an unmarked grave until 1973.