Zora Neale Hurston

Zora Neale Hurston was born in Alabama and raised in Eatonville, Florida, then a self-governed all-Black community. In the 1920s, Hurston earned a B.A. in anthropology from Barnard College and then pursued graduate work at Columbia University. She returned to Alabama and Florida in 1928 to conduct anthropological fieldwork, filming rural Black communities with a 16mm camera. That same year, Hurston published the essay “How It Feels to be Colored Me,” in which she discusses her childhood in Florida.

Though Hollywood never adapted any of Hurston’s books to film, studio story departments did read and prepare reports about her fiction and nonfiction, as Elizabeth Binggeli has shown.

In 1941, Hurston worked briefly for Paramount Studios; the next year, she wrote to Carl Van Vechten that she was working with a producer at RKO to develop a story that could be adapted. Claudia Tate has argued that this project became the novel Seraph on the Suwanee.

Hurston was friends with both Fannie Hurst and Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings, whose regionalist stories were often adapted to film. Warner Bros. expressed interest in purchasing Seraph to adapt it, thinking it could become their version of MGM’s The Yearling (adapted from Rawlings’ eponymous novel), but ultimately did not buy the rights.