Zora Neale Hurston
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50 free Zora Neale Hurston trivia questions with answers — literature quiz, new questions added Aug 2026.
Zora Neale Hurston grew up in Eatonville, one of the first all-Black incorporated towns in America, shaved ten years off her age to get into high school, became the first African American at Barnard, trained under Franz Boas, and wrote Their Eyes Were Watching God in seven weeks in Haiti. She also filmed the last known survivor of the transatlantic slave trade, fell out with Langston Hughes over a play, and died in a county welfare home, buried in a grave nobody marked until Alice Walker went looking for it in 1973. These 50 questions cover the life, the books and the revival. Notasulga and Eatonville, the Morgan Academy birth-year trick, Howard and The Hilltop, Charlotte Osgood Mason's $200 a month, Fire!! and the Niggerati, Spunk and Sweat, Mules and Men, Jonah's Gourd Vine, Janie Crawford and Tea Cake, Richard Wright's review, Tell My Horse, Moses, Man of the Mountain, Seraph on the Suwanee, Ruby McCollum, the bonfire a policeman put out, Every Tongue Got to Confess, Barracoon in 2018 and the Halle Berry film. Every answer is cited to a page we checked, with a short explanation so you learn something even when you miss.
30 of 50 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01In Their Eyes Were Watching God, Janie finds her happiest years picking beans 'on the muck' in which region?
The Everglades
The Everglades. Kept behind a shop counter and out of the porch talk by her second husband, Janie works the bean fields beside her third and is at last part of the storytelling.
Q 02Hurston gave Eatonville, Florida, as her birthplace, but in which state was she actually born?
Alabama
Alabama. She was born in Notasulga but reached Eatonville as a toddler, and it was Eatonville that she called home.
Q 03After her mother died, Hurston was sent from all-Black Eatonville to a boarding school in which Florida city?
Jacksonville
Jacksonville. Her father soon remarried, she and her stepmother could not get on, and before long she was on her own and working for her keep.
Q 04Hurston spent 18 months touring as a singer's personal attendant in a troupe that performed whose operettas?
Gilbert and Sullivan
Gilbert and Sullivan. The company's actors lent her books, played her classical music and treated her as one of their own; she counted the months with them among her fondest memories.
Q 05Hurston's mother urged her children to 'jump at' what, saying they would at least get off the ground?
The sun
The sun. 'We might not land on the sun, but at least we would get off the ground,' Hurston recalled; her father took the opposite line and warned her against having too much spirit.
Q 06Why did the 26-year-old Hurston start passing herself off as ten years younger in 1917?
To enrol in high school
To enrol in high school. She finished within a year and went on to college, but never gave the decade back: even the headstone placed on her grave in 1973 gives her birth year as 1901.
Q 07Hurston finished high school at Morgan Academy in which city?
Baltimore
Baltimore. She left the touring theatre company there and waited tables to put herself through; the school is now Morgan State University.
Q 08Which school's student newspaper, The Hilltop, did Hurston co-found?
Howard
Howard. She scraped together the fees by working as a waitress and as a manicurist in a Black-owned Washington barbershop that served only white customers.
Q 09Which sorority, founded by and for Black women, did Hurston join in college?
Zeta Phi Beta
Zeta Phi Beta. It began when a member of the Phi Beta Sigma fraternity asked Arizona Cleaver to start a sister organisation, and she invited four friends to join her.
Q 10In 1925 Hurston became the first African American admitted to which women's college?
Barnard
Barnard. One of the college's founders met her at a literary awards dinner and arranged a scholarship; Hurston, its only Black student, discovered anthropology there and graduated in 1928.
Q 11Under which Columbia anthropologist did Hurston study and conduct research?
Franz Boas
Franz Boas. Like his other students she called him 'Papa Franz', and it was he who sent her home to collect, as science, the tall tales she had grown up hearing in Eatonville.
Q 12Which white patron paid Hurston $200 a month to collect folklore in the South?
Charlotte Osgood Mason
Charlotte Osgood Mason. The wealthy widow insisted that her protégés call her 'Godmother', and in return for the money she claimed control of everything Hurston collected.
Q 13What became of Fire!!, the 1926 magazine Hurston launched with Wallace Thurman and other young Harlem writers?
It folded after one issue
Q 21In Their Eyes Were Watching God, the young Janie's awakening comes as she lies beneath which blossoming tree?
A pear tree
A pear tree. Stirred by the bees in its blossom, she lets a passing boy kiss her; her grandmother sees it and promptly marries her off to an older farmer.
Q 22In Their Eyes Were Watching God, what is the nickname of Janie's third husband, Vergible Woods?
Tea Cake
Tea Cake. Much younger than Janie, he is the first man to treat her as an equal, teaching her to play checkers and taking her fishing at midnight.
Q 23Which real 1928 disaster strikes in Their Eyes Were Watching God?
The Okeechobee hurricane
It folded after one issue. The magazine set out to shock the older generation of Black leaders, and many readers were duly offended; a second number never appeared.
Q 14Hurston's story 'Sweat', about the washerwoman Delia and her husband Sykes, features which animal?
A rattlesnake
A rattlesnake. Sykes hides it in the laundry basket to be rid of his wife, who is terrified of snakes, but it is Sykes who is bitten while Delia waits outside.
Q 15Which Hurston story was selected for Alain Locke's landmark 1925 anthology The New Negro?
Spunk
Spunk. It had just taken second prize in Opportunity magazine's first literary contest, and her entrance at the awards dinner won her the friends who launched her career in New York.
Q 16Hurston's 1928 essay about growing up in Eatonville is titled what?
How It Feels to Be Colored Me
How It Feels to Be Colored Me. Refusing the sorrow readers expected, she declares 'I am not tragically colored' and says she does not weep at the world: 'I am too busy sharpening my oyster knife.'
Q 17Hurston's 1935 collection of African-American folklore is titled what?
Mules and Men
Mules and Men. To fill it she went home to Eatonville for the tales she had grown up on, which their tellers called 'lies'.
Q 18In which city did Hurston apprentice herself to hoodoo doctors in the late 1920s?
New Orleans
New Orleans. She went through the hoodoo doctors' initiation rites herself, which opened doors closed to other researchers, and came away with tales of the voodoo queen Marie Laveau.
Q 19What was the title of Hurston's 1934 debut novel?
Jonah's Gourd Vine
Jonah's Gourd Vine. Its preacher hero and his wife are called John and Lucy, the names of Hurston's own parents, and his womanising wrecks everything he has built.
Q 20Hurston wrote Their Eyes Were Watching God in seven weeks, trying, she said, to work through what?
A love affair she left
A love affair she left. She had walked away from a younger man she called the love of her life, and wrote the novel, she said, to 'embalm all the tenderness of my passion for him'.
The Okeechobee hurricane. It drove the lake over its levee and drowned more than 2,500 people, most of them migrant farm workers; the novel's title comes from the night its characters sit out the storm in the dark.
Q 24In Their Eyes Were Watching God, Janie's second husband Joe Starks is elected to what position in Eatonville?
Mayor
Mayor. He buys up land, opens the town's store and is soon running the place, but when the men call for a speech from his wife he will not let her say a word.
Q 25Which African-American novelist panned Hurston's 1937 novel as carrying 'no theme, no message'?
Richard Wright
Richard Wright. He accused her of serving white readers a 'quaint' picture of Black life; reviewing his first book a year later, she remarked that it held perhaps enough killing 'to satisfy all male black readers'.
Q 26Who played the lead in the 2005 television film of Their Eyes Were Watching God?
Halle Berry
Halle Berry. Oprah Winfrey had held the film rights for years before her company finally made it for ABC, and she introduced the broadcast herself.
Q 27Tell My Horse (1938) documents Hurston's research on rituals in Jamaica and which other country?
Haiti
Haiti. She studied Vodou there at close quarters and photographed Felicia Felix-Mentor, a woman whose family said she had died and been buried thirty years earlier.
Q 28Which foundation funded Hurston's 1936–37 Caribbean research?
Guggenheim
Guggenheim. She spent seven weeks of the fellowship writing a novel rather than field notes, and the foundation renewed it for a second year all the same.
Q 29Hurston's 1939 novel retells which biblical book from an African-American perspective?
Exodus
Exodus. In Moses, Man of the Mountain the Hebrews talk in Black Southern speech, and Pharaoh takes Moses for a hoodoo man rather than a messenger of God.
Q 30Seraph on the Suwanee (1948), the last novel Hurston published in her lifetime, is unusual for featuring mainly what?
White characters
White characters. Its heroine is a poor white Florida woman, and Hurston said she wanted to show that a Black author could write white lives as well.