Life & Background
Hurston was born in Alabama in 1891 and raised in Eatonville, Florida, one of the first incorporated all-Black towns in America — a childhood among Black self-government that shaped everything she wrote and set her apart from writers whose subject was white oppression. She shaved ten years off her age to qualify for free high school, studied at Howard and then at Barnard under the anthropologist Franz Boas, and returned south to collect folklore, published as Mules and Men. She was a central figure of the Harlem Renaissance, known for her wit and for opinions that infuriated her peers. Their Eyes Were Watching God was attacked by Richard Wright for failing to serve the protest tradition. She fell out of print, worked as a maid and a substitute teacher, and died in poverty in Florida in 1960, buried in an unmarked grave until Alice Walker found and marked it in 1973.
Their Eyes Were Watching God
Janie Crawford returns to Eatonville in overalls, and tells her friend Pheoby the story the town is gossiping about. Raised by her grandmother, a former slave who marries her at sixteen to an older farmer for security, Janie leaves him for Joe Starks, an ambitious man who becomes mayor of the all-Black town of Eatonville and makes her the mayor's wife — forbidden to speak in public, made to tie up her hair, kept as an ornament. After twenty years and his death she meets Tea Cake, a younger man with no money, and goes with him to work the muck in the Everglades, where for the first time she is happy and working alongside a man rather than displayed by one. A hurricane comes; Tea Cake is bitten by a rabid dog saving her, and she is forced to shoot him. She is tried by a white jury, acquitted, and comes home.
The novel alternates a lyrical third-person narration with dialogue in dense Black Southern vernacular, and Hurston's refusal to translate or apologise for that speech is the formal centre of the book — her training under Boas gave her a linguist's ear and a cultural relativist's confidence. The frame, in which Janie tells her own story to another woman, makes the novel an act of self-narration by a Black woman for a Black woman listener, which is why later criticism reads it as a foundational text of voice. Richard Wright's 1937 attack, calling it a novel with no theme and no message that carried on the minstrel tradition, is the standard counter-text and a useful window on the argument between protest fiction and cultural celebration.
Why Hurston Matters
Hurston's recovery — driven by Alice Walker's 1975 essay In Search of Zora Neale Hurston — is the most famous case of canon revision in American literature, and Their Eyes Were Watching God is now among the most taught American novels. She is central to African American women's writing, to the Harlem Renaissance, and to debates about vernacular and voice, and Henry Louis Gates Jr's theory of Signifyin(g) uses her as a principal example. Her anthropological work on folklore and on Haitian religion is significant independently.
Key Facts
All Major Works
- Jonah's Gourd Vine1934
- Mules and Men1935
- Their Eyes Were Watching God1937
- Tell My Horse1938
- Moses, Man of the Mountain1939
- Dust Tracks on a Road1942
- Barracoon2018