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One of the greatest American writers of the twentieth century died in a county welfare home and was buried in an unmarked grave in a segregated cemetery. Her neighbours took up a collection for the funeral. It was not enough for a headstone. Zora Neale Hurston. 1960. She had published four novels, two books of folklore, an autobiography and dozens of essays. She had travelled the South and Haiti collecting stories that would otherwise have been lost entirely. She wrote "Their Eyes Were Watching God" in seven weeks. By the 1950s she was out of print and working as a maid in Florida. A newspaper found her in 1950 cleaning a house, and ran it as a human interest story: a once-famous author, scrubbing somebody's floor. She had a stroke and went into the St Lucie County welfare home. She died there in January 1960, aged sixty-nine. She was buried in the Garden of Heavenly Rest, the Black cemetery in Fort Pierce, in a plot nobody marked. Thirteen years later a young writer named Alice Walker went to Florida to find her. She walked into a waist-high field of weeds and snakes, shouting Zora's name, until her foot sank into a depression in the ground. She bought a headstone. It reads: "A Genius of the South." Hurston is now taught in every American literature course in the country. Her books were out of print for a quarter of a century, and she went into the ground with nothing on top of her.