Their Eyes Were Watching God
Zora Neale Hurston (1937)
“A Black woman's quest for selfhood told in the most beautiful English prose of the 20th century — dismissed by critics, buried for decades, then resurrected to become essential.”
Their Eyes Were Watching God— Historical Context & Author Background
Author: Zora Neale Hurston · Published 1937· Era: Harlem Renaissance·219 pages
Themes explored: identity, gender, love-obsession, race, independence, class, nature, voice
About Zora Neale Hurston
Zora Neale Hurston (1891-1960) was born in Eatonville, Florida — the same town in the novel — the first incorporated all-Black municipality in the United States. She was the only Black student in her class at Barnard College, where she studied anthropology under Franz Boas, the founder of American cultural anthropology. She returned to the South on anthropological fieldwork, collecting Black folk tales, songs, and vernacular speech that became the raw material for both her scholarly work (Mules and Men, 1935) and her fiction. She wrote Their Eyes Were Watching God in seven weeks while doing fieldwork in Haiti in 1937. Male Black writers of the Harlem Renaissance — particularly Richard Wright and Ralph Ellison — dismissed the novel as 'quaint' and insufficiently political. It went out of print, and Hurston died poor in 1960, buried in an unmarked grave in Fort Pierce, Florida. Alice Walker found her grave in 1973, placed a marker reading 'A Genius of the South,' and wrote a celebrated essay that began the novel's rediscovery. It is now one of the most taught novels in American universities.
Life → Text Connections
How Zora Neale Hurston's real experiences shaped specific elements of Their Eyes Were Watching God.
Hurston grew up in Eatonville — the real all-Black town in Florida
Eatonville as setting — the porch, the store, the town meetings, the communal culture
The novel is not imagined Black community — it is documented Black community rendered as fiction. Hurston knew these voices because she was raised among them.
Hurston trained as an anthropologist and collected Black folklore
The porch storytelling scenes, the tall tales, the folk metaphors — the entire texture of vernacular culture in the novel
The dialect is not literary invention. It is fieldwork. Hurston transcribed real speech patterns from real people. The dialect scenes are ethnographic literature.
Hurston had turbulent romantic relationships and a short-lived marriage
Janie's three marriages — particularly the complexity of the Tea Cake relationship
The emotional texture of what loving someone more powerful than you, or more volatile, or more free feels like comes from lived experience, not abstraction.
Hurston was dismissed by male Harlem Renaissance writers as insufficiently political
The novel's focus on interior life and romantic love rather than racial protest
The novel IS political — it argues that Black interior life, Black joy, Black vernacular, and Black women's selfhood are worth literary attention. The dismissal proved her point.
Historical Era
Harlem Renaissance / Jim Crow South, 1920s-1930s
How the Era Shapes the Book
The Harlem Renaissance context is essential for understanding the novel's reception: male writers (Wright, Ellison) believed Black literature must be directly confrontational with white oppression. Hurston's choice to write about Black interior life — about love, community, self-realization — was seen as evasion. But Hurston's anthropological training told her that the most radical act was to document Black culture as complex, complete, and internally sufficient — not defined by its relationship to white oppression. The Okeechobee Hurricane appears directly in the novel. Jim Crow appears in the trial scene. But these are not the novel's subject — they are its weather.
Why Their Eyes Were Watching God Matters Historically
Published in 1937 to mixed reviews — dismissed by Richard Wright as 'quaint' and by many Harlem Renaissance critics as insufficiently political. It went out of print and Hurston died poor and forgotten in 1960. Alice Walker found her grave in 1973 and wrote 'In Search of Zora Neale Hurston' (1975), which began the rediscovery. The novel was reissued in 1978 and has not gone out of print since. It is now among the most taught novels in American universities and is regularly listed among the greatest American novels of the 20th century.
- First major American novel to center a Black woman's interiority — her desires, her selfhood, her erotic and spiritual life — as its sole subject
- First sustained literary use of African American Vernacular English as a narrative language equal in authority to standard literary English
- One of the first American novels to treat Black community as complete and internally complex rather than defined primarily by its relationship to white oppression
Challenged in schools for sexual content (the pear tree passage), for dialect perceived as stereotyping, and for scenes of domestic violence. The banning arguments often replicate the original critical dismissals — the same impulse that told Hurston her subject wasn't important enough.