Zora Neale Hurston is well known for her work as an author, but what people don't know about her is that things don't always work out been easy. Throughout her childhood, she found herself constantly packing and moving between relatives, and she was never able to return to the place she truly loved (Lillios). However, everything she experienced in her early years contributed to her success later in life. Many details in Hurston's books, particularly Their Eyes Were Watching God, are closely related to events that actually happened, which is perhaps part of the reason they seem so believable. Elements of Hurston's life preceding his success as an author inspired several aspects of his work and may have subsidized its current prominence. Zora Neale Hurston was born in 1891 in Alabama, although ever since she moved to Eatonville, Florida as a little girl, she has considered Boyd (Boyd) home. His mother was a schoolteacher before deciding to focus her life on her eight children, and his father was a priest who also served as the town's mayor for three terms (Lillios). Hurston truly loved Eatonville and would have stayed there all her life if she could, but her fairy tale ended at the age of thirteen when her mother died tragically (Boyd). Her father quickly remarried a much younger woman whom Zora never much liked, occasionally getting into fights with her (Boyd). As her father did not pay much attention to his children, Zora was forced to leave home and live with her relatives in other parts of the country (Boyd). The next few years for Huston consisted of working, most often as a caregiver. housekeeper, instead of what she really wanted to do: go to school (Lillios). Unless... middle of paper... he even said, "Janie had spent most of the day under a flowering pear tree in the garden" just thinking about it (Hurston 10). Much like Hurston, Janie dated several men before finding the one she truly loved, and in both cases it was a much younger man (The Big Read). Easy is a word that's nowhere near close. to describe the life of Zora Neale Hurston in any way. She worked harder than most people could dream of working because she knew what she wanted to do and she wasn't going to let anyone slow her down. Her childhood was a very difficult time for her and most people in her situation would have let that ruin them, but she decided to turn things around for the better. She took all the bad things she experienced early in her life and used them for success by incorporating them into her work as an author..