The American author and folklorist Zora Neale Hurston (1891–1960) grew up in Eatonville, Florida, one of the first all-black towns incorporated after the Emancipation Proclamation, and later attended Howard University in Washington, DC. After earning an associate’s degree at Howard, she was offered a scholarship to Barnard College, Columbia University, where she studied anthropology and was the school’s only black student. Much of her anthropology work focused on black folklore traditions in the American South and in the Caribbean, and she published a collection of such stories in 1935 in Mules and Men. Hurston also wrote fiction, including her best-known work, Their Eyes Were Watching God (1937), which, with the help of Alice Walker (author of The Color Purple) was made popular in the 1970s.