It’s the birthday of Zora Neale Hurston (1891-1960), a member of the Harlem Renaissance who is best known today for her novel Their Eyes Were Watching God (1937), and the good news is that if you have always wanted to read a description of what untreated rabies does to a human being, then look no further: this is the book for you. (Trigger warning: the description is almost enough to make you not want to get rabies.)

Hurston was born in Notasulga, Alabama, the fifth child out of eight, but the family soon moved to Eatonville, Florida, and Hurston always considered it home. Eatonville was the first incorporated black township in the U.S. and a positive setting for a black child, and Hurston had a happy childhood for the first 13 years. Then her mother died, her father remarried very quickly, and home life—as always happens in fairy tales containing stepmothers—tanked. At 16, Hurston joined a traveling Gilbert & Sullivan troupe as a maid.

By 1917, Hurston was 26 and still hadn’t finished high school, so she lied about her age and went back to high school at Morgan Academy in Baltimore, finishing in June of 1918. She went on to study at Howard University and then Barnard College, publishing her first stories in the meantime, and graduated from Barnard in 1928 with a degree in anthropology. For several years she published both anthropological research and novels: Jonah’s Gourd Vine (1934, a novel); Mules and Men (1935, her collection of black folklore in North Florida); Their Eyes Were Watching God; Tell My Horse: Voodoo and Life in Haiti and Jamaica (1938, research on voodoo in the Caribbean); Moses, Man of the Mountain (1939, a novel). In 1942, she published her autobiography, Dust Tracks on a Road, now understood to be wildly unreliable. A final novel followed in 1948, Seraph on the Suwanee.

Hurston was a bold and charismatic person said to have “the gift of walking into hearts.” For a time, she was good friends with Langston Hughes, another major figure of the Harlem Renaissance. (The two tried to collaborate on a play, Mule Bone, but the friendship ended over authorship issues.) Hurston married several times, but none of the marriages took. While her greatness was recognized in her lifetime, eventually her work fell out of favor and by the end of her life, Hurston was penniless. She had a stroke in 1959 and had to enter the St. Lucie County Welfare Home, where she died on January 28, 1960. She was buried in an unmarked grave in Fort Pierce, Florida. In 1973, Alice Walker found Hurston’s grave and put up a gray headstone that read, “Zora Neale Hurston: A Genius of the South.” Walker went on to revive interest in Hurston’s work.

In 2018, Hurston’s nonfiction book Barracoon: The Story of the Last “Black Cargo” was finally published in its entirety. Based on Hurston’s interviews with Cudjo Lewis, it tells the story of the man believed to be the last survivor of the last slave ship to bring Africans to the U.S. The book had been rejected by publishers back in the 1930s because of its use of the vernacular.

Have a find Monday entirely devoid of contact with rabid animals and stay scrupulously honest to the data.