Now, a Literary Moment...

In the '20s and '30, Zora Neale Hurston was a highly successful writer associated with the Harlem Renaissance. Yet by the time of her death in 1960, she was forgotten and penniless. Novelist Alice Walker discovered Hurston's work years later.

Alice Walker: ?And I read it, loved it, felt really embarrassed as a person of color, as a woman and as a writer, that she seemed to have been thrown away. I couldn't believe it. There was something in me that was just so mortified. So I felt that it was really my duty and my pleasure of course, as duty sometimes is, to go and to try and rectify this.

Walker traveled to Florida and found Hurston's unmarked grave, bought a headstone and engraved it "genius of the south." She continues to champion Hurston's work to new generations.

This Literary Moment was created by the National Endowment for the Arts.