Zora Neale Hurston, a pillar of the Harlem Renaissance, spent years as an anthropologist documenting Black folklore. In 1927, she interviewed Cudjo Lewis, the last known survivor of the Clotilda, the final slave ship to bring captives from Africa to America. She wrote his story in a book titled 'Barracoon,' but she could not find a publisher during her lifetime because she insisted on keeping Lewis’s phonetic dialect rather than 'correcting' it to standard English. Publishers felt the dialect was too difficult for readers. The manuscript sat in archives for nearly 90 years until it was finally published in 2018. Hurston died in poverty and was buried in an unmarked grave, only for her work to be rediscovered in the 1970s by Alice Walker. Today, 'Their Eyes Were Watching God' is considered one of the most important novels of the 20th century.