Their Eyes Were Watching God - Zora Neale Hurston, 1937.

Perhaps the most famous product of the inter-war black artistic movement that came to be known as the Harlem Renaissance, Zora Neale Hurston’s account of a woman’s pursuit of happiness over the course of twenty years and three marriages provides the modern day reader with a telling insight into a black, and female, existence in a segregated America.

We are often told that the first rule of creative writing is to write about what you know. The similarities between the author and her protagonist, Janie Crawford, are striking. Hurston herself grew up in the all-black Floridian town of Eatonville, whose founding is recounted in the novel, and the plot’s chronology roughly matches that of her own age and lifetime. Racism is unsurprisingly inherently present in Their Eyes Were Watching God, however it is in Hurston’s observations on the place of black women in early twentieth-century America which deserve the greatest admiration. Janie’s loss of innocence and quest for happiness through two failed marriages forms a plot culminating in the factual Okeechobee hurricane of 1928, leading to tragedy, but ultimately contentment for our heroine, who succeeds in breaking the typecasts that had previously been cemented for the black woman in literature; overbearing matriarch or slut.*

Hurston’s phonetic spelling of her characters’ speech lends the novel an intrinsic credibility for which the author deserves to be lauded. Such nuances of spoken communication that are expressed in her dialogue are predominantly limited to a black, southern-USA context; however any initial comprehension difficulties to such alien language that may be encountered are soon overcome by the authority and standing this gives the text. The result this method has had on Nobel Prize winning author Toni Morrison is evident, and Zora Neale Hurston’s place in African American literary history is testament to the timeless splendour of Their Eyes Were Watching God.



*According to Sherley Anne Williams