“ Being a black woman writer in the ’30s, ’40s, and ’50s did not pay well. It still doesn’t, I can assure you of that. So she never made a lot of money in her lifetime. It was not a rags-to-riches-to-rags story. There were never any riches. The largest royalty Hurston ever made from any of her books was $943.75. Here’s the thing, Hurston was committed to being a writer to using her talents to chronicle the lives of black communities even when that work did not pay well, which was most of the time. So she was never making a lot of money from her work, yet she remained committed to it. So when she died, there wasn’t a lot of money in her bank account, but she was rich in other ways….
~ podcast interview with Hurston biographer Valerie Boyd
