Around this time, Hurston had a few literary successes, placing in short-story and playwriting contests in Opportunity: A Journal of Negro Life, published by the National Urban League.

[30] When foundation grants ended during the Great Depression, Hurston and her friend Langston Hughes both relied on the patronage of philanthropist Charlotte Osgood Mason, a white literary patron.

During her time in the Durham area, Hurston primarily participated in a variety of thespian activities, marking her lasting interest in Black folkloric theater and drama.

[37] She taught various courses at NCCU, but she also studied informally at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill with Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright Paul Green.

It is likely that her departure was partially due to her poor relationship with NCCU's president, James E. Shepard, to which she briefly alluded in her 1942 autobiography, Dust Tracks on a Road.

[42] To Shepard, Hurston's attire and lifestyle choices were inappropriate for an unmarried woman, leading to many disagreements; her severance was rumored to be "the only thing that [they] could apparently agree upon.

[1]: 157  She was researching lumber camps in north Florida and commented on the practice of white men in power taking black women as concubines, including having them bear children.

[1]: 246–247 In 1935, Hurston traveled to Georgia and Florida with Alan Lomax and Mary Elizabeth Barnicle for research on African-American song traditions and their relationship to slave and African antecedent music.

Hurston expressed interest in the polyethnic nature of the population in the region (many, such as the Miskito Zambu and Garifuna, were of mixed African and indigenous ancestry and had developed creole cultures).

[50] Upon reaching Live Oak, Hurston was surprised not only by the gag order the judge in the trial placed on the defense but by her inability to get residents in town to talk about the case; both blacks and whites were silent.

[50] Unable to pay independently to return for the appeal and second trial, Hurston contacted journalist William Bradford Huie, with whom she had worked at The American Mercury, to try to interest him in the case.

[52] Hurston celebrated that "McCollum's testimony in her own defense marked the first time that a woman of African-American descent was allowed to testify as to the paternity of her child by a white man.

A law officer and friend, Patrick DuVal, passing by the house where she had lived, stopped and put out the fire, thus saving an invaluable collection of literary documents.

According to her biographer Robert E. Hemenway, this piece largely plagiarized the work of Emma Langdon Roche,[61] an Alabama writer who wrote about Lewis in a 1914 book.

[63] In 1928, Hurston returned to Alabama with additional resources; she conducted more interviews with Lewis, took photographs of him and others in the community, and recorded the only known film footage of him—an African who had been trafficked to the United States through the slave trade.

After this round of interviews, Hurston's literary patron, philanthropist Charlotte Osgood Mason, learned of Lewis and began to send him money for his support.

[69] By the mid-1930s, Hurston had published several short stories and the critically acclaimed Mules and Men (1935), a groundbreaking work of "literary anthropology" documenting African-American folklore from timber camps in North Florida.

Her folk revue The Great Day featured authentic African song and dance, and premiered at the John Golden Theatre in New York in January 1932.

Hurston's first three novels were published in the 1930s: Jonah's Gourd Vine (1934); Their Eyes Were Watching God (1937), written during her fieldwork in Haiti and considered her masterwork; and Moses, Man of the Mountain (1939).

Jackson (2000) argues that Hurston's meditation on abjection, waste, and the construction of class and gender identities among poor whites reflects the eugenics discourses of the 1920s.

[73] In 1952, Hurston was assigned by the Pittsburgh Courier to cover the small-town murder trial of Ruby McCollum, the prosperous black wife of the local bolita racketeer, who had killed a racist white doctor.

[63] In 2008, The Library of America selected excerpts from Ruby McCollum: Woman in the Suwannee Jail (1956), to which Hurston had contributed, for inclusion in its two-century retrospective of American true crime writing.

[68] In February 2022, a collection of Hurston's non-fiction writings titled You Don't Know Us Negroes and Other Essays, edited and Henry Louis Gates, Jr, and Genevieve West, was published by HarperCollins.

[79] Several of Hurston's literary contemporaries criticized her use of dialect, saying that it was a caricature of African-American culture and was rooted in a post-Civil War, white racist tradition.

Although she once stated her support for the "complete repeal of All Jim Crow Laws", she was a contrarian on civil rights activism and she generally lacked interest in being associated with it.

[112] Although her personal quotes show disbelief of religion, Hurston did not negate spiritual matters as evidenced from her 1942 autobiography Dust Tracks on a Road: Prayer seems to be a cry of weakness, and an attempt to avoid, by trickery, the rules of the game as laid down.

In the original draft of her autobiography, Dust Tracks on a Road, Hurston compared the United States government to a "fence" in stolen goods and a Mafia-like protection racket.

Hurston thought it ironic that the same "people who claim that it is a noble thing to die for freedom and democracy... wax frothy if anyone points out the inconsistency of their morals... We, too, consider machine gun bullets good laxatives for heathens who get constipated with toxic ideas about a country of their own."

[116] Hurston also opposed preferential treatment for African Americans, saying: If I say a whole system must be upset for me to win, I am saying that I cannot sit in the game and that safer rules must be made to give me a chance.

However, a common criticism of her work is that the vagueness of her racial politics in her writing, particularly about black feminism, makes her "a prime candidate for white intellectual idolatry.