Zora Neale Hurston wrote Their Eyes Were Watching God, one of the most important novels in American literature, and died penniless in a welfare home in Fort Pierce, Florida. Her manuscripts were nearly burned in a trash heap before a friend rescued them. The Harlem Renaissance star who captured Black Southern vernacular with more precision and beauty than any writer before her was forgotten for decades before Alice Walker found her unmarked grave and brought her back.

This episode traces Hurston from her all-Black hometown of Eatonville through the Harlem Renaissance, her anthropological fieldwork in the Caribbean, the masterpiece that was dismissed in her lifetime, and the literary resurrection that restored her to her rightful place.

• Hurston's childhood in Eatonville, Florida — the all-Black town that shaped her worldview
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