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Hurtston was one of the earliest famous African-American women writers. Hurston was also an anthropologist whose fiction and non-fiction both took a sharp, bold, and unapologetic look at the struggles and hardships of blacks in America while blending folklore with stories. Her work included African-American dialects, which some of her fellow authors of the time and many later authors criticized as demeaning (CBC), and between that and racism, interest in her work declined for some years after her death. But a generation later, new readers discovered her thanks mainly to the efforts of author Alice Walker, and her books have found their way to colleges and bestseller lists again (ibid).
