Zora Neale Hurston was born in the all- black township of Eatonville, Florida, in 1891, while F. Scott Fitzgerald was born five years later in the mostly white, Minnesota capital of Saint Paul, in 1896. By the 1920s, both Hurston and Fitzgerald had migrated to the East, the frontier of an emerging unequal multiracial, multiethnic, multiclass, capitalistic, modern American society. Both were engaging the City— including the literary movement called the Harlem Renaissance and the Jazz Age— and moving in and out of the City. From New York City, Hurston and Fitzgerald moved in different directions. In addition to studying anthropology at Columbia University, Hurston was making fieldtrip forays to Florida, New Orleans, Honduras, Haiti, and Jamaica, collecting folklore and examining black cultures that were close to their African roots. Fitzgerald was living the fast life in New York, bashing in the glamour of the Jazz Age as “a sort of amusing hobby” and making several excursions to Paris, Rome, and the French Riviera, where he befriended Ernest Hemingway and other exiled American and European writers and artists. Later, he would go to Hollywood where he would work on screenplays for United Artists.

In their major fiction, both Hurston and Fitzgerald are responding to the emerging, (industrial) capitalist, commercial, mass, modern American society in New York in particular and in the United States in general in the 1920s. Reacting to the Repressive State and Ideological State apparatuses and the representation of the African American as exotic, primitive other, Hurston in Their Eyes Were Watching God, like Djuna Barnes in Nightwood, offers a form of knowledge to formulate a different conceptual formation. She prowls the noncapitalist, natural world, establishing the African American in the folk world, to give “voice to [southern black] people whose [folk] culture was rapidly changing in the wake of twentieth- century progress.” In their respective novels, Their Eyes Were Watching God (1937) and The Great Gatsby (1925), Hurston and Fitzgerald retreat, respectively, to Eatonville, Florida, and Saint Paul, Minnesota, where they re/ produce forms of modernity that are nonetheless constructed and conceived in opposition to the classical, metropolitan marked modernity in New York. But the two construct different alternative modernities.