Like many artists before her, Zora Neale Hurston received virtually no recognition for her work until after her death. Hurston began her career as an anthropologist, observing and documenting the tension of race relations in the American South. She strove to expose the horrific practice of "paramour rights," wherein white men sexually exploited black women in their employment. But this work and her later fiction, including the now famous Their Eyes Were Watching God, would end up in relative obscurity as her fictional portrayal of African American dialect was criticized as offensive and her political views were often less progressive than those of her contemporaries. With engaging, accessible text, this biography gives readers a fuller picture of this complicated writer and woman.