About the Author

Zora Neale Hurston (1891–1960) wrote Their Eyes Were Watching God out of a life no other American novelist of her generation had lived. She was born in Notasulga, Alabama and raised in Eatonville, Florida — the first incorporated all-Black town in the United States, chartered in 1887 — and that fact alone explains a great deal about the book. Where most Black writers of the 1930s were writing out of Harlem, Chicago, or the Jim Crow rural South, Hurston came up inside a self-governing Black municipality with its own mayor, its own post office, its own porch storytellers. She didn't have to imagine Eatonville for the novel. She grew up inside it.

By the time she wrote Their Eyes, Hurston had trained as an anthropologist at Barnard under Franz Boas, the founder of American cultural anthropology, and had spent years driving a Chevrolet through the rural South and the Caribbean collecting folklore, work songs, and religious practices. She was a central figure of the Harlem Renaissance — friend and occasional rival to Langston Hughes — and yet she died in 1960 on welfare in Fort Pierce, Florida, and was buried in an unmarked grave. In 1973 the novelist Alice Walker drove to that cemetery, picked a spot in the weeds she thought was close enough, and paid for a headstone that reads "A Genius of the South."

Detailed Analysis

The anthropological training is everywhere in the novel's texture. Hurston's 1935 ethnography Mules and Men transcribed Eatonville and Polk County folk speech with a rigor no earlier writer had brought to African American Vernacular English; Tell My Horse (1938) documented her fieldwork on Haitian vodou and Jamaican obeah. The porch talk, the mule funeral, the lying contests, the Bahamian "Saws" dances on the muck, the work songs of the bean pickers — these are not atmospheric decoration but transcribed material, deployed inside a novel. The split between Hurston's standard literary English in the narration and the rendered dialect in the dialogue is the signature of a writer who understood that AAVE was a fully developed language system, not a defective version of anything, and who refused to translate it down for white readers.

Hurston's position inside the Harlem Renaissance was always a little sideways. She believed Black literature did not owe white readers either uplift or protest, and she was suspicious of the "New Negro" insistence that every Black writer speak on behalf of the race. This put her at odds with the rising protest-fiction tradition of Richard Wright and, later, Ralph Ellison and James Baldwin, and it is the direct cause of the hostile 1937 reception that drove the novel — and Hurston herself — out of print. That she now anchors almost every serious syllabus of twentieth-century American literature, while Wright's Native Son reputation has been complicated by exactly the charges he made against her, is one of the great reversals in American literary history.

Historical Background

Hurston wrote Their Eyes Were Watching God in roughly seven weeks in the fall of 1936, while she was in Haiti on a Guggenheim fellowship doing anthropological fieldwork on vodou. J.B. Lippincott published it in September 1937. The novel is set in West and central Florida — Eatonville, the citrus belt, the Everglades "muck" around Lake Okeechobee — across the first quarter of the twentieth century, roughly the 1900s through the late 1920s. Its climactic storm is not invented. It is the Okeechobee hurricane of September 1928, a Category 4 that broke the southern dike of Lake Okeechobee and drowned an estimated 2,500 people, the majority of them Black migrant farmworkers in the cane and bean fields south of the lake. It remains one of the deadliest natural disasters in US history and the deadliest in Florida's, and for decades was among the least taught.

Eatonville itself is a piece of history a modern student usually has to be handed. When the town incorporated in 1887, it was the first self-governing all-Black municipality in the country, and its existence shaped Hurston's sense of what a Black community could be when it wasn't organized in reaction to white power. Joe Starks' campaign to build a town with its own mayor, its own street lamp, and its own post office is drawn directly from the founding of Eatonville by Joseph Clarke and the original settlers.

Detailed Analysis

The hurricane chapters are where Hurston fuses ethnography with history into something unmistakably political. The detail of the burial detail in Palm Beach — white bodies going into pine coffins, Black bodies into quicklime in mass graves — is historically accurate to the 1928 aftermath, when county authorities ran exactly this two-tier disposal and Black corpses were buried in a segregated pauper's grave at 25th Street and Tamarind Avenue that went unmarked until 2002. Hurston puts this on the page in chapter 19 without a word of editorial comment, and then lets the novel turn on a Black woman being tried for her husband's death in a Palm Beach courtroom three weeks later. The juxtaposition does the work that Richard Wright accused the book of refusing to do.

The novel's initial reception is one of the sharpest cases of critical misreading in the American canon. Wright's October 1937 New Masses review dismissed it as carrying "no theme, no message, no thought" and accused Hurston of a "minstrel technique that makes the 'white folks' laugh." Alain Locke, the dean of the Harlem Renaissance, was ambivalent in Opportunity. The book went out of print, Hurston's career collapsed, and by the early 1950s she was working as a maid in Miami. The 1975 Ms. magazine essay by Alice Walker, "In Search of Zora Neale Hurston," along with Robert Hemenway's 1977 biography and Henry Louis Gates, Jr.'s 1980s scholarship on the African American literary tradition, almost single-handedly rebuilt the novel's reputation. It is now read as a founding text of Black feminist literary tradition, taught in nearly every American high school and college course on twentieth-century African American literature, and was adapted by Oprah Winfrey's Harpo Productions into a 2005 ABC film starring Halle Berry. What readers once dismissed as apolitical is now recognized as the book's whole argument: a Black woman's interior life — her desire, her speech, her refusal — is political ground in itself.