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.”
Why This Book Matters
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.
Firsts & Innovations
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
Cultural Impact
Alice Walker's 1975 essay 'In Search of Zora Neale Hurston' directly sparked the feminist literary recovery of the 1970s-1980s
Credited by Toni Morrison, Alice Walker, and many others as the founding text of the Black women's literary tradition
The novel's use of AAVE in narration influenced virtually every subsequent Black American author
Oprah Winfrey produced a film adaptation in 2005 starring Halle Berry
Regularly taught alongside The Great Gatsby, Beloved, and Invisible Man as a central American literary text
Banned & Challenged
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.