Writer Zora Neale Hurston is an American paradox.

Educated at Barnard College as well as Howard University, she was supported by influential whites and denounced by the black intelligentsia in her time.

A member of the urban Harlem Renaissance of the 1920s, Hurston dignified and celebrated the people and culture of the poor, rural South.

From 1934-48, she was one of the country's most prolific authors, yet she died in poverty in 1960 at 68 and was buried in an unmarked grave.

Now rightly considered a major literary voice and pioneer anthropologist in folk study, Hurston is still an enigma for most readers because of her original, at times idiosyncratic writing style. This "American Masters" profile, airing tomorrow night at 9 on WQED-TV, solves some of the puzzle.

Studying with anthropologist Franz Boas at Columbia University in the mid-'20s, Hurston, 35, found her calling at last after years wandering from her childhood home in Florida to Harlem. Her warm and funny personality and talent for storytelling won her many admirers, black and white.

The talking-heads style of these PBS profiles is more effective than usual here, thanks to a collection of sharp, knowledgeable experts, from her first and best biographer Robert E. Hemenway to pungent comments from the late novelist Dorothy West, who died 10 years ago, and several black literature scholars.

Henry Louis Gates and Alice Walker, the usual suspects in programs about African-Americans, this time offer fresh insights while Maya Angelou provides her magnetic presence but little interpretation of Hurston's work.

It was Walker who found and marked with a headstone, incorrect birthdate and all, Hurston's grave in Florida.

The late Frank Bolden, longtime Pittsburgh Courier editor, is both charming and humorous in his memories of the writer, who contributed articles to the foremost African-American newspaper.

Actress S. Epatha Merkerson, best known for her role as Lt. Anita Van Buren on the TV crime drama "Law & Order,'' narrates.

"Jump at the Sun" balances the writer's literary career with her path-breaking studies of rural African-American life in the South of the 1930s and the voodoo culture of New Orleans.

Clips of seldom-seen films, some shot by Hurston, are fascinating images of those times 70 years ago including sound footage of a spiritual worship service with the writer playing drums.

The dramatization sequences with actress Kim Brockington playing Hurston, however, clash with the raw power of the documentary films because there's a feeling of artificiality to Brockington's performance.

The profile does not gloss over Hurston's later years, tarnished by a dubious charge of child sex abuse, declining health and a misunderstood opposition to the 1950s civil rights movement.

Reared in the all-black town of Eatonville, Fla., she favored segregation without realizing that "separate but equal" was all of the former and little of the latter.