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1 1 Origins and Childhood During her lifetime, Zora Neale Hurston gave at least three different dates for the day she was born. Her first biographer, Robert E. Hemenway, stated that she was probably born in 1901 in Eatonville, Florida. In fact, she was born ten years earlier, on January 7, 1891, and over four hundred miles away in Notasulga, Alabama. Hurston lied for a variety of reasons about her age. When she was in her twenties, she posed as a teenager hoping to complete her high school education. Later, she slashed a decade off her age in order to act as a young ingénue eager for the guidance and patronage of wealthy mentors in 1920s Harlem. From the very start of her life, Hurston mixed fact and fantasy, myth and history to create a truth that is less con- cerned with accuracy than with her own desires and belief in self-creation. There are fewer biographies of Hurston than would be expected of a writer of her stature, but unlike such male counterparts as Richard Wright and James Baldwin, she presents unique challenges to delineating a factual representation of her life. With Hurston, there are truths in her lies and fantasies in her history. Teasing these apart reveals the complexities of a creative trickster who fashioned art out of her life. A literary genius and an anthropological visionary, Hurston remains one of the most fascinating figures in American letters because she refuses to be contained by simplis- tic definitions. A feminist who never seems to have used the word, a black writer who at times both essentialized and spurned race, Hurston seems to multiply the closer we look, inhabiting and performing various selves that reflect a transcendent artistic vision.