Born and raised in Florida, Huston moved to Washington, DC, and enrolled at Howard University in the early 1920s. In 1925, she moved to New York City. She enrolled at Barnard College, where she was the only Black student. She earned her bachelor’s degree in anthropology in 1928 and continued on to graduate study at Columbia University. Hurston studied under Franz Boas, who embraced cultural relativism, an anthropological theory that holds there are no superior or inferior cultures; rather, all cultures have their own practices and elements, and all are of equal and inherent value. In 1936 and 1937, she received Guggenheim Fellowships for her research.

Hurston worked as an anthropologist, ethnographer, and folklorist, traveling across the American South and the Caribbean. She wrote many nonfiction essays in the discipline, as well as the book Barracoon (completed in 1931 but published posthumously in 2018), which was based on her interviews with the last known survivor of the final slave ship to come to the United States.

Hurston’s bent for anthropology, ethnography, and folklore is reflected her literary work. Her stories often detail daily life, highlighting all-Black communities and everyday people. In Hurston’s time, literature paid little attention to common people and placed even less value on lived experiences of African American people.