Zora Neale Hurston

Raised in Eatonville, Florida (one of the first incorporated Black townships in America), she studied anthropology at Barnard under Franz Boas and carried a folklorist's ear back into fiction, recording the voice of the porch and the pulpit as she had once recorded the voice of Haitian Vodou ceremonies in the field.

Their Eyes Were Watching God, written in a matter of weeks after a failed love affair, drew fire from Richard Wright and other male contemporaries for refusing protest fiction in favor of a Black woman's interior life. The rebuke helped bury the book for decades.

She died in 1960, impoverished and working as a maid, and was buried in an unmarked grave in Fort Pierce, Florida, until Alice Walker found the spot in 1973 and had a headstone cut: 'A Genius of the South.'