Their Eyes Were Watching God

Description:

Zora Neale Hurston's now-classic novel about Janie Crawford, the granddaughter of an ex-slave, and her three husbands: Mr. Killicks, Mayor Starks and, finally, Tea Cake--the love of her life. The novel is set in a black community in rural Florida, and the characters speak in dialect--a technique that inspired both anger and praise from other black writers. THEIR EYES WERE WATCHING GOD, first published in 1937, is a landmark novel of the black experience in America and also--because of Janey's stubborn insistence on her independence--of feminism.

Selected Reviews:

"'Their Eyes Were Watching God' brought a heartbeat and breath to all Hurston's years of research. Raising a folk culture to the heights of art, it fulfilled the Harlem Renaissance dream....The paramount ironies, however, are two: the heroine is not quite black, and becomes even less black as the story goes on; and the author offers perhaps the most serious Lawrentian vision ever penned by a woman of sexual love as the fundamental spring and power of life itself."

--Claudia Roth Pierpont, New Yorker