About This Stamp
With this 19th stamp in the Literary Arts series, the U.S. Postal Service honors novelist, folklorist, and anthropologist Zora Neale Hurston for her artistry and her celebration of black culture. Artist Drew Struzan based his portrait of Hurston on a 1934 black-and-white photograph taken in Chicago by Carl Van Vechten. The background of the stamp art recalls the setting of Hurston's novel Their Eyes Were Watching God.
The artwork of Drew Struzan, one of the most published illustrators of our time, has appeared on many United States postage stamps, including Alfred Lunt and Lynn Fontanne (1999) in the Performing Arts series; Broadway Songwriters (1999) and Hollywood Composers (1999), both in the Legends of American Music series; and Lucille Ball (2001) in the Legends of Hollywood series.
Carl Van Vechten (1880–1964) was a writer, photographer, and patron of black artists and writers. Van Vechten enjoyed warm friendships with many of his photographic subjects, including Zora Neale Hurston. She dedicated Tell My Horse, her second book of folklore, to him. The photograph of Hurston was used with the permission of the Van Vechten Trust.
Stamp Art Director
Howard E. Paine
A member of the Citizens’ Stamp Advisory Committee before being named an art director in 1981, Howard E. Paine supervised the design of more than 400 U.S. postage stamps. After three decades as an art director for the U.S. Postal Service, he retired in 2011.
For more than 30 years Paine was an art director for the National Geographic Society, where he redesigned National Geographic magazine, developed the children’s magazine, National Geographic World, and designed Explorers Hall. A popular lecturer, he has spoken at Yale University and New York University, among others, and presented programs for the National Park Service and the Smithsonian Institution. A judge for numerous art shows and design competitions, Paine also taught magazine design at The George Washington University.
Paine had been a stamp collector since childhood. In 2000, he designed the catalog for Pushing The Envelope: The Art of the Postage Stamp, an exhibit of original stamp art at the Norman Rockwell Museum in Stockbridge, Massachusetts.
Howard Paine died on September 13, 2014.