January 7, 1891	Born in tiny Notasulga, Alabama, the fifth of eight children, to John Hurston, a carpenter, sharecropper, and Baptist preacher, and Lucy Potts Hurston, a former schoolteacher.
1892?	Family moves to Eatonville, Florida.
January 7, 1901	Usually and falsely claimed this as her birthdate.
1902?	Impresses two white ladies who visit her grade school, and they give her her first books.
1904	Is devastated by her mother's death. Raised from here on by her unaffectionate father.
January 7, 1910	Claimed this was her birthdate on her second marriage license.
Sept 1917	At 26, finally begins high school at Morgan Academy in Baltimore.
June 1918	Receives high school diploma.
June-August 1918	Works as a waitress in a nightclub and a manicurist in a Black-owned barbershop that serves only whites.
1918-19	Attends Howard Prep School.
1919-1924	Attends Howard University and meets Alain Locke. Earns less than two years of credits.
1920	Receives an associate degree from Howard.
1921	Publishes her first story, "John Redding Goes to Sea," in a campus magazine.
December 1924	Publishes "Drenched in Light," a short story, in Opportunity.
January, 1925	Arrives in New York, jobless, just as the Harlem Renaissance begins to crest.
May 1925	Wins Opportunity contest with "Spunk" and her play Color Struck; Judges include Fannie Hurst and the legendary Eugene O'Neill. Publishes "Spunk."
1925	Begins working for Fannie Hurst as a "secretary" who can't type.
1925-1927	Receives scholarship from Annie Nathan Meyer and attends Barnard College, studying anthropology.
1926	begins field work for Franz Boas, the father of anthropology.
January 1926	Published "John Redding Goes to Sea" in Opportunity.
July 1926	Organizes Fire! With Langston Hughes and Wallace Stevens.
August 1926	Publishes "Muttsy" in Opportunity.
September 1926	Publishes "Possum or Pig" in the Forum.
November 1926	Publishes the only issue of Fire!, featuring her story "Sweat."
1927	Publishes The First One, a play, in Charles S. Johnson's Ebony and Topaz.
February 1927	Goes to Florida to collect folklore.
May 17, 1927	Marries Herbert Sheen, her longtime Howard boyfriend.
October 1927	Publishes story of black settlement in St. Augustine, and the story "Cudjo's Own Story of the Last African Slaver," in the Journal of Negro History.
September 1927	Asks Mrs. Rufus Osgood Mason for patronage.
December 1927	Signs contract with Mrs. Mason, returns to the South to collect folklore. She is later accused of pandering to Mrs. Mason.
1928	Receives her bachelor of arts from Barnard.
January 1928	Separates from Sheen, briefly reunites with him, files for divorce.
May 1928	Publishes "How It Feels to Be Colored Me" in the World Tomorrow.
1930-32	Organizes the field notes that become Mules and Men.
May-June 1930	Works on the play Mule Bone with Langston Hughes.
1931	Publishes "Hoodoo in America" in the Journal of American Folklore.
February 1931	Breaks with Langston Hughes over the authorship of Mule Bone.
July 7, 1931	Divorces Sheen.
September 1931	Writes for a theatrical revue called Fast and Furious.
January 1932	Writes and stages a theatrical revue called The Great Day, first performed on January 10 on Broadway at the John Golden Theatre; works with the creative literature department of Rollins College, Winter Park, Florida, to produce a concert program of Negro music.
1933	Writes "The Fiery Chariot."
January 1933	Stages From Sun to Sun (a version of Great Day) at Rollins College.
August 1933	Publishes "The Gilded Six-Bits" in Story.
1934	Publishes six essays in Nancy Cunard's anthology, Negro.
January 1934	Goes to Bethune-Cookman College to establish a school of dramatic arts "based on pure Negro expression."
May 1934	Publishes Jonah's Gourd Vine, originally titled Big Nigger; it is a Book-of-the-Month Club selection.
September 1934	Publishes "The Fire and the Cloud" in Challenge.
November 1934	Singing Steel (a version of Great Day) is performed in Chicago.
January 1935	Makes an abortive attempt to study for a Ph.D in anthropology at Columbia University on a fellowship from the Rosenwald Foundation. In fact, she seldom attends classes.
1935	Works with Alan Lomax on a Library of Congress folk-music recording expedition.
August 1935	Joins the WPA Federal Theatre Project as a "dramatic coach."
October 1935	Mules and Men, based on her folklore research, is published. Receives some acclaim.
March 1936	Awarded a prestigious Guggenheim Fellowship to study Obeah Voodoo practices in West India.
April-Sept 1936	Conducts research in Jamaica and is disgusted by the mulattos' racism towards darker blacks.
Sept-March 1937	Is frustrated by habitual liars in Haiti; writes Their Eyes Were Watching God in seven weeks, inspired by her relationship with the mysterious "P.M.P.", her perfect love, whom she abandoned.
May 1937	Researches in Haiti on a renewed Guggenheim.
September 1937	Returns to the United States.
Sept. 18, 1937	Their Eyes Were Watching God is published.
Feb-March 1938	Writes Tell My Horse, largely based on folklore; it is published the same year.
April 1938	Impoverished, she joins the Federal Writers Project in Florida to work on The Florida Negro. Many of her articles are rejected or severly edited.
1939	Publishes "Now Take Noses" in Cordially Yours.
June 1939	Receives an honorary Doctor of Letters degree from Morgan State College.
June 27, 1939	Marries Albert Price III in Florida.
Summer 1959	Hired as a drama instructor by North Carolina College for Negroes at Durham; meets Paul Green, professor of drama, at the University of North Carolina.
November 1939	Moses, Man of the Mountain, her synthesis of folklore and the old testament, is published.
February 1940	Files for divorce from Price, though the two are reconciled briefly.
Summer 1940	Makes a folklore-collecting trip to South Carolina.
April-July 1941	Writes her autobiography, Dust Tracks on a Road.
July 1941	Publishes "Cock Robin, Beale Street" in Southern Literary Messenger.
Oct 1941-Jan 1942	Works as a story consultant at Paramount Pictures.
July 1942	Publishes "Story in Harlem Slang" in American Mercury magazine.
September 5, 1942	Publishes a profile of Lawrence Silas in Saturday Evening Post.
November 1942	Dust Tracks on a Road is published.
February 1943	Awarded the Anisfield-Wolf Book Award in Race Relations for Dust Tracks; appears on the cover of the Saturday Review.
March 1943	Receives Howard University's Distinguished Alumni Award.
May 1943	Publishes "The 'Pet Negro' Syndrome" in American Mercury.
November 1943	Divorce from Price granted.
1944-1945	Spends time living on a isolated houseboat on Florida rivers.
June 1944	Publishes "My Most Humiliating Jim Crow Experience" in the Negro Digest.
1945	Writes Mrs. Doctor; it is rejected by her publisher, Lippincott.
March 1945	Publishes "The Rise of the Begging Joints" in American Mercury.
December 1945	Publishes "Crazy for This Democracy" in the Negro Digest.
1946	Returns to New York, works on a Republican congressional campaign. Candidate loses.
Dec 1946-Mar 1947	Lives cold and alone in an apartment on 124^th Street in New York.
1947	Publishes a review of Robert Tallant's Voodoo in New Orleans in Journal of American Folklore.
May 1947	Goes to British Honduras to research black communities in Central America; writes Seraph on the Suwanee; stays in Honduras until March 1948.
September 1948	Accused of molesting a ten-year-old boy and arrested.
October 1948	Seraph on the Suwanee, a love story about Florida crackers, is published amid controversy.
1949	Embarassed by headlines about court case, she becomes depressed and suicidal.
March 1949	Molestation case against her is dismissed as groundless.
March 1950	Publishes "Conscience of the Court" in Saturday Evening Post, while working as a maid in Rivo Island, Florida.
April 1950	Publishes "What White Publishers Won't Print" in Saturday Evening Post.
1950	Moves to Miami, works as a maid.
November 1950	Publishes "I Saw Negro Votes Peddled" in American Legion magazine.
January 1951	Impoverished, moves to Belle Glade, Florida.
June 1951	Publishes "Why the Negro Won't Buy Communism" in American Legion magazine.
December 8, 1951	Publishes "A Negro Voter Sizes Up Taft" (the 2nd Republican she campaigned for) in Saturday Evening Post.
1952	Hired by the Pittsburgh Courier to cover the Ruby McCollum case. McCollum was a married black woman who shot a white male doctor amid allegations of sexual scandal.
1954	Takes a public stance against desegregration, claiming that blacks don't need white America or its educational system. Is decried by her former allies as a traitor.
May 1956	Receives an award for "education and human relations" from Bethune-Cookman College.
June 1956	Works as a librarian at Patrick Air Force Base in Florida.
1957	Fired from librarian job. Moves to a small cabin in Fort Pierce, where she grows her own food..
1957-59	Writes a column on "Hoodoo and Black Magic" for the Fort Pierce Chronicle.
1958	Works as a substitute teacher at Lincoln Park Academy, Fort Pierce.
1959	Suffers a debilitating stroke.
October 1959	Without support from family or friends, she is forced to enter St. Lucie County Welfare Home.
January 28, 1960	Dies in the St. Lucie County Welfare Home of "hypertensive heart disease"; buried in an unmarked grave in the segregated Garden of Heavenly Rest, Fort Pierce.
August 1973	Alice Walker discovers and marks Hurston's grave.
March 1975	Walker publishes "In Search of Zora Neale Hurston," in Ms., launching a Hurston revival.
1990-1995	Their Eyes Were Watching God sells over a million copies. All her other major works are republished.
1993	Fort Pierce builds the Zora Neale Hurston Branch Library.
1996	Zora becomes the fourth African-American and the fifth woman (first both) to be published in the distinguished Library of America series.
1999	Zora's complete writings from the Federal Writers Project are published in Go Gator and Muddy the Water.