Born in Eatonville, Florida, the first all-black incorporated city in the United States, Hurston went to Harlem at age 16 as part of a traveling theatrical company. She attended Howard University before transferring to Barnard College where she graduated with a degree in anthropology in 1928. She then pursued graduate studies in anthropology for two years at Columbia University. She lived in New York City until 1950 but spent much of her time traveling throughout the American South and also to Haiti, Bermuda, and the Honduras to study the folkways of African-Americans. Although her early work was well received, she became increasingly conservative and alienated from her fellow African-Americans as a result of her political opinions, which included opposition to school integration. She moved to Florida in 1950 and died in obscure poverty ten years later. Her writing was "rediscovered" by critics and readers in the later years of the 20th century.