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.”
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.