Zora Neale Hurston was an American author and anthropologist known for her novel Their Eyes Were Watching God and for collecting and preserving African American folklore. She studied anthropology at Barnard College under the pioneering scholar Franz Boas, becoming the college's first Black graduate. She was a leading voice of the Harlem Renaissance, a flourishing of Black art, music, and literature in the 1920s and 1930s. She traveled widely researching folk traditions, determined to capture and celebrate voices that had rarely been written down before.