A novelist, short story writer, anthropologist, and folklorist, Zora Neale Hurston is the author of four novels, Jonah’s Gourd Vine (1934), Their Eyes Were Watching God (1937), Moses, Man of the Mountain (1939), and Seraph on the Suwanee (1948). She also published nonfiction, including two books of folklore, Mules and Men (1935) and Tell My Horse (1938), and the memoir Dust Tracks on a Road (1942). Ironically, her last published book of nonfiction, Barracoon (posthumous, 2018), was the first full-length book she wrote. Between 1918 and 1924, Hurston began her undergraduate degree at Howard University. She completed her college degree at Barnard College in New York in 1927.
Hurston later worked as an anthropologist, conducting field studies under a Guggenheim Fellowship, and as a journalist, teacher, and freelance writer.
Hurston rented a room at this first location in 1922 or ’23 while a student at Howard University. The Phyllis Wheatley YWCA was briefly Hurston’s home in 1924, also while she was a student at Howard.
The Homes
3017 Sherman Ave. NW, Washington, DC
901 Rhode Island Ave. NW, Washington, DC (Phyllis Wheatley YWCA)
The first and only independent African American YWCA in the US, this Colonial Revival building rented rooms and was a meeting place for a range of local and national organizations serving African Americans. It was named for the first published African American poet. Phillis Wheatley was a slave brought by ship from Africa to Boston in 1761, who published Poems on Various Subjects, Religious and Moral in 1773.
The building was added to the National Register of Historic Places in 1983. Not open to the public.
Zora Neale Hurston
3017 Sherman Ave. NW
Located in Columbia Heights/Mount Pleasant neighborhood, Northwest - East of Rock Creek
Zora Neale Hurston
901 Rhode Island Ave. NW
Located in Shaw/Logan Circle neighborhood, Northwest - East of Rock Creek