ty.
Hurston never stayed at a job for too long, constantly refusing the advances of male employers, which showed part of her strong feminist disposition. But Hurston was still seeking true love throughout her travels and education. At Howard University, Hurston met Herburt Sheen, whom she married on May 19, 1927, in St. Augustine, Florida (DA, 2). They divorced shortly after they were married because they could not continue the idealistic dreams they had shared in their youth. Zora Hurston's second marriage to Albert Price III was also short lived.
They were married in 1939 and divorced in 1943 (DA, 2). By the mid-1940s Hurston's writing career had began to falter. While living in New York, Hurston was arrested and charged with committing an immoral act with a ten-year-old boy. The charges were later dropped when Hurston proved that she was in another country at the time the incident allegedly took place (Discovering Authors, 3).
Hurston already was witnessing the rejection of all works submitted to her publisher, but the combined effects of the arrest and the ensuing journalistic attack on her image doomed the majority of her literary career. She wrote to a friend:
I care nothing for writing anything any moreà My race has seen fit to destroy me without reason, and with the vilest tools conceived by man so far (Discovering Authors, 4).
In approximately 1950, Hurston returned to Florida, where she worked as a cleaning woman in Rivo Alto. She later moved to Belle Glade, Florida, in hopes of reviving her writing career. She failed, and worked many jobs including: newspaper journalist, librarian, and substitute teacher (Baker, http://www.prodigy.com/ pages.html/chronology.htm).
Hurston suffered a stroke in 1959 which demanded her admittance into the Saint Lucie County Florida Welfare Home, where she died a broken, penniless, invalid in January 1960 (DA, 5). All of Hurston's trials built the basis for her best work. ...