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Their Eyes Were Watching God by Zora Neale Hurston - review

‘Many romantic novels basically have the same plot, but this is something no one would have ever imagined’

When I started reading this book, I thought it might just be one of the books related to discrimination against black communities by a white society. Well, I am completely wrong. This book is a combination of sentiments - true love, relations and family - although they have a minor segment on discrimination.

Janie, who is in search of her true love, stumbles across a man called Johnny Taylor and proceeds to get to know him, not thinking about his background information or anything. Janie’s grandmother, however, sees this entire scenario differently. She wants her granddaughter well settled, and thus she forces her to marry a man called Logan Killicks who is aged around 40 years so that she will have a well-settled future.

After a few days, Janie is impressed by a man named Joe Starks who is willing to build up a society so he becomes the mayor, so she marries him by eloping. Due to misunderstandings the relation between both of them worsens and Joe Starks dies.

This is when Janie finally meets a young man who is the man of her dreams and who defines true love for her.

This novel is a packet of surprises as we have no idea what’s going to happen next. Many romantic novels basically have the same plot, but this novel is something no one would have ever imagined. 

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Their Eyes Were Watching God

By zora neale hurston.

‘Their Eyes Were Watching God’ by Zora Neale Hurston is an enthralling book based on a feministic awakening of a certain Janie Crawford, after she decides she doesn’t want to cue into a prevalent gender role that turns women of her generation into mere housewives and second fiddle in the family.

Article written by Victor Onuorah

Degree in Journalism from University of Nigeria, Nsukka.

Through the pages of ‘ Their Eyes Were Watching God ,’ Janie searches for equality, greater involvement, mutual respect, and true love from her male counterparts, and the lack of these leads her to adventures outside of her hometown and through three marriages as she struggles to find her perfect match. In the end, she has a taste of what she was looking for and goes home a refined, better woman who is at peace with herself.

Overall Sublime Style

Zora Neale Hurston’s ‘ Their Eyes Were Watching God ’ follows a style that is both fascinating and unique all at once. The style of the book is clearly witty, colloquial, and informal – with the point of view typically derived from the 1930s black Floridian community.

Zora Neale Hurston’s education prepared her for this and helped her develop the sort of sublime style she used for her book ‘ Their Eyes Were Watching God ’ – having graduated from Howard University and became the first black person to complete studies at Barnard College.

The uniqueness of Hurston’s style for ‘ Their Eyes Were Watching God ’ was so important for the author, who wanted it to be as original as possible. For this reason, she would embark on several trips down south to record and gather the vernaculars and other cultural aspects peculiar to the people of that area.

The result of such an endeavor produces a book awash with figurative metaphors and similes, phonetically spelled words, witty expressions, and lurid imagery – giving the book a truly unique style well suited for the narrative that it focused on.

Impeccable Storyline

Every good book follows a standard story plot which usually includes introducing the central character and pinning the entire story around their struggles, life’s challenges, and experiences. This is the same with Zora Neale Hurston’s masterwork, ‘ Their Eyes Were Watching God .’ 

Janie, the main act, seeks more out of life than the average woman of her generation. She wants the opportunity to have more meaningful roles in her circle, her family, and society at large. Spurred by such drive, Janie strives to be different, has a list of dreams to achieve, and wants an honest and loving partner who respects and gives her true freedom and independence to achieve the things she wants.

Unfortunately, in the times that Janie lives, this thinking is considered weird and inappropriate – if not morally wrong. Still, she is defiant and stands up for what she believes, and doesn’t let these popular opinions get in the way of her joy, happiness, and resolve for herself. She plays hardball and chases this dream until she finds it – or at least tastes it, but not without having to go through the rigors of three tough marriages.

Stout Feminist Narrative

Like Zora Neale Hurston herself, Janie, the main character in ‘ Their Eyes Were Watching God ,’ exhibits all the right characteristics of a proper feminist. The book seems to heavily address aspects of feminist theory, such as gender inequality, patriarchal dominance, abuse, and oppression – all of which are the things Janie fights against in her society.

Although the basis of Janie’s advocacy for women’s rights and struggle for freedom is rational and reasonable, the book doesn’t all that eliminate the negatives of having an extreme feminist mentality – in which case the good gender fight of wanting fair men-women equality now becomes something more like a vendetta or competition against men.

Hurston’s ideas through Janie’s character are no doubt meant to drive an important social change in not only the book’s reality but also in the author’s 1930s patriarchal society. However, the reader may see glimpses of needless disobliging and lack of submitting information on the part of Janie towards her husband – as she always wants to get her way. 

Powerful Tale for Gender Social Change

Hurston’s ‘ Their Eyes Were Watching God ’ was one of the earliest books which drew attention to the issue of negative gender roles and bias towards women and sought to redress it, or at least stir positive actions towards it, by lending a voice to what was already the norm in the early 20s and 30s.

With a few detractions from the book’s ideas based on forceful feminism, the work has proved to be no short of inspiration for later years of social reformation – especially in the area of gender roles and equality policies.

The 30’s Black Slangs are Exciting but Slow-Paced

Hurston’s revisiting of the folklores of African Americans in the South meant that she had to be true to the traditions – more remarkably and spread throughout the book being their slang and vernaculars, giving the book originality and a sort of lovely unconventionality.

The only detractor on this front might be pinned on Hurston’s reluctance to plot speed, making the scenes unnecessarily slow-paced and a bit of a drag. However, notwithstanding a few nays, Zora Neale Hurston’s ‘ Their Eyes Were Watching God’ is genuinely a book that can have a truly remarkable impact on the reader.

Why should you read ‘ Their Eyes Were Watching God ’ by Zora Neale Hurston?

One of the reasons you should read Zora Neale Hurston’s ‘Their Eyes Were Watching God ’ is because the book is such an essential piece of black history in the United States. Although Hurston wrote this book as fiction, the stories therein were inspired by the lives of actual black people and their true life struggle – from slavery through the American civil war. 

How has Hurston’s ‘ Their Eyes Were Watching God ’ contributed meaningfully to society? 

Zora Neale Hurston , through her trademark book ‘ Their Eyes Were Watching God ,’ fights every day for equality among genders. The novel is one of the first books to advocate for women’s rights, gender bias, abuse, and subjugation of women by society and men. 

How difficult is it to read ‘ Their Eyes Were Watching God ’ by Zora Neale Hurston?

The story of ‘ Their Eyes Were Watching God ’ by Zora Neale Hurston is a fairly difficult book to read, and this is because the author incorporated a range of African American dialects, vernacular, and colloquial in other to preserve the pristineness of the story. However, there is also a vast usage of standard English enough to help the reader understand what is being said in the context they are said. 

Why was ‘ Their Eyes Were Watching God ’ disliked by critics?

The main reason the book was disliked by most critics after its release, was because they found the book lacking clarity in terms of it not addressing the prevailing political reality of such times.

'Their Eyes Were Watching God' by Zora Neale Hurston: A Captivating and Empowering Journey of Self-Discovery.

Book Title: Their Eyes Were Watching God

Book Description: 'Their Eyes Were Watching God' is a classic in African American literature, advocating women's rights through a powerful narrative embedded in black history.

Book Author: Zora Neale Hurston

Book Edition: First Edition

Book Format: Hardcover

Publisher - Organization: J. B. Lippincott & Co.

Date published: September 18, 1937

ISBN: 978-0-06-088400-1

Number Of Pages: 200

• Lasting Impact

Their Eyes Were Watching God Review: A Teenager's Journey to Change the Narrative for the Women of Her Society

Recognized as a 20th-century classic of African American literature, Zora Neale Hurston’s greatest novel, ‘Their Eyes Were Watching God,’ represented one of the earliest voices that called for women’s rights and recognition in a society designed for the masculine. This book of Hurston’s is one filled with themes that are exciting, controversial, and educative all at once. It is a fantastic piece of black history in America.

• Historically rich African American narrative
• Gripping storyline
• A satisfying ending 
• Slow-placed 
• Complicated diction
• Misogynistic and overly racial

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About Victor Onuorah

Victor is as much a prolific writer as he is an avid reader. With a degree in Journalism, he goes around scouring literary storehouses and archives; picking up, dusting the dirt off, and leaving clean even the most crooked pieces of literature all with the skill of analysis.

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Oprah Winfrey Presents: Their Eyes Were Watching God

In her wonderful essay “Looking for Zora,” Alice Walker reports on a visit to a weed-grown, snake-infested Florida cemetery, looking for the unmarked grave of the novelist and anthropologist Zora Neale Hurston, and calling out in frustration: “Zora! I’m here. Are you?” I felt like calling out the same thing after sitting still for this reverential adaptation of Hurston’s remarkable novel. Halle Berry was a fine—maybe even an inevitable—choice to play the part of Janie Crawford, growing up through three marriages to a surprising selfhood in the Everglades. Equally shrewd was casting Ruben Santiago-Hudson as Joe Starks, mayor of the all-black township of Eatonville, and Michael Ealy as Tea Cake, who introduces Janie to sexual pleasure. Ruby Dee is the grandmother anyone would want. Suzan-Lori Parks seems ideally suited to turn the novel into a screenplay. And the hurricane is terrific.

But the novel had another kind of weather, altogether omitted here, and that was language, for which there should have been some film equivalent besides the periodic immersions of Halle in metaphorically baptismal waters. And while I can understand leaving out the courtroom scenes, a modern version of Their Eyes should have felt itself obliged to reconsider Hurston’s odd complacency about male violence. Yes, the book was a classic, deserving better than it got in 1937, especially from critics like Richard Wright who should have known better. But being too respectful means embalming.

Oprah Winfrey Presents: Their Eyes Were Watching God ABC Sunday, March 6, 9 to 11:30 P.M.

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The First Reviews of Their Eyes Were Watching God

"she had waited all her life for something, and it had killed her when it found her".

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It is so easy to be hopeful in the daytime when you can see the things you wish on. But it was night, it stayed night. Night was striding across nothingness with the whole round world in his hands . . . They sat in company with the others in other shanties, their eyes straining against cruel walls and their souls asking if He meant to measure their puny might against His. They seemed to be staring at the dark, but their eyes were watching God.

Now considered one of the greatest novels of the 20th century, Zora Neale Hurston’s Their Eyes Were Watching God  had to travel a rocky road to immortality. Initial reviews ranged from positive to condescending to downright hostile, as many in the African American literary community bristled at Hurston’s rejection of the Harlem Renaissance and W.E.B. Du Bois’ Uplift agenda. A decades-long wilderness period in which both the novel and its author fell into obscurity ended with the establishment of several Black Studies programs in universities across America in the 1970s and 1980s. This, coupled with a growing black feminist movement, spearheaded by activist writers like Audre Lorde and Alice Walker, helped create a space in which Hurston’s work could be rediscovered. Walker’s 1975 essay, ‘ Looking for Zora ,’ in which she chronicled her search for Hurston’s unmarked grave, was a particularly significant part of this effort.

83 years on from its publication, we take look back at some of the original reviews of Their Eyes Were Watching God.

“Whether or not there was ever a town in Florida inhabited and governed entirely by Negroes, you will have no difficulty believing in the Negro community which Zora Neale Hurston has either reconstructed or imagined in this novel. The town of Eatonville is as real in these pages as Jacksonville is in the pages of Rand McNally; and the lives of its people are rich, racy, and authentic. The few white characters in the book appear momentarily and incidentally. The title carries a suggestion of The Green Pastures , but it is to this extent misleading; no religious element dominates this story of human relationships … The only weak spots in the novel are technical; it begins awkwardly with a confusing and unnecessary preview of the end; and the dramatic action, as in the story of the hurricane, is sometimes hurriedly and clumsily handled. Otherwise the narration is exactly right, because most of it is in dialogue, and the dialogue gives us a constant sense of character in action. No one has ever reported the speech of Negroes with a more accurate ear for its raciness, its rich invention, and its music.”

–George Stevens,  The Saturday Review of Literature , September 18, 1937

“Miss Hurston seems to have no desire whatever to move in the direction of serious fiction … Miss Hurston can write, but her prose is cloaked in that facile sensuality that has dogged Negro expression since the days of Phillis Wheatley. Her dialogue manages to catch the psychological movements of the Negro folk-mind in their pure simplicity, but that’s as far as it goes. Miss Hurston  voluntarily  continues in her novel the tradition which was  forced  upon the Negro in the theatre, that is, the minstrel technique that makes the ‘white folks’ laugh. Her characters eat and laugh and cry and work and kill; they swing like a pendulum eternally in that safe and narrow orbit in which America likes to see the Negro live: between laughter and tears … The sensory sweep of her novel carries no theme, no message, no thought. In the main, her novel is not addressed to the Negro, but to a white audience whose chauvinistic tastes she knows how to satisfy. She exploits that phase of Negro life which is ‘quaint,’ the phase which evokes a piteous smile on the lips of the ‘superior’ race.”

–Richard Wright,  The New Masses , October 5, 1937

“This is Zora Hurston’s third novel, again about her own people–and it is beautiful. It is about Negroes, and a good deal of it is written in dialect, but really it is about everyone, or least everyone who isn’t so civilized that he has lost the capacity for glory … The story of Janie’s life down on the muck of Florida Glades, bean picking, hunting and the men shooting dice in the evening and how the hurricane came up and drove the animals and the Indians and finally the black people and the white people before it, and how Tea Cake, in Janie’s eyes the ‘son of Evening Son,’ and incidentally the best crap shooter in the place, made Janie sing and glitter all over at last, is a little epic all by itself. Indeed, from first to last this is a well nigh perfect story–a little sententious at the start, but the rest is simple and beautiful and shining with humor. In case there are readers who have a chronic laziness about dialect, it should be added that the dialect here is very easy to follow, and the images it carries are irresistible.”

–Lucille Tompkins,  New York Times Book Review , September 26, 1937

“It isn’t that this novel is bad, but that it deserves to be better. In execution it is too complex and wordily pretty, even dull—yet its conception of these simple Florida Negroes is unaffected and really beautiful … Through these chapters there has been some very shrewd picturing of Negro life in its naturally creative and unself-conscious grace … If this isn’t as grand as it should he, the breakdown comes in the conflict between the true vision and its overliterary expression. Crises of feeling are rushed over too quickly for them to catch hold, and then presently we are in a tangle of lush exposition and overblown symbols; action is described and characters are talked about, and everything is more heard than seen. The speech is founded in observation and sometimes wonderfully so, a gold mine of traditional sayings…But although the spoken word is remembered, it is not passed on. Dialect is really sloppy, in fact…And so all this conflict between the real life we want to read about and the superwordy, flabby lyric discipline we are so sick of leaves a good story where it never should have been potentially: in the gray category of neuter gender, declension indefinite.”

–Otis Ferguson,  The New Republic , October 13, 1937

“And now, Zora Neale Hurston and her magical title:  Their Eyes Were Watching God . Janie’s story should not be re-told; it must be read. But as always thus far with this talented writer, setting and surprising flashes of contemporary folk lore are the main point. Her gift for poetic phrase, for rare dialect, and folk humor keep her flashing on the surface of her community and her characters and from diving down deep either to the inner psychology of characterization or to sharp analysis of the social background. It is folklore fiction at its best, which we gratefully accept as an overdue replacement for so much faulty local color fiction about Negroes. But when will the Negro novelist of maturity, who knows how to tell a story convincingly — which is Miss Hurston’s cradle gift, come to grips with motive fiction and social document fiction? Progressive southern fiction has already banished the legend of these entertaining pseudo-primitives whom the reading public still loves to laugh with, weap over and envy. Having gotten rid of condescension, let us now get over oversimplication!”

–Alain Locke,  Opportunity , June 1, 1938

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THEIR EYES WERE WATCHING GOD

by Zora Neale Hurston ‧ RELEASE DATE: Sept. 16, 1937

I loved Jonah's Gourd Vine— thought some of her short stories very fine—and feel that this measures up to the promise of the early books. Authentic picture of Negroes, not in relation to white people but to each other. An ageing grandmother marries off her granddaughter almost a child to a middle-aged man for security—and she leaves him when she finds that her dreams are dying, and goes off with a dapper young Negro, full of his own sense of power and go-getter qualities. He takes her to a mushroom town, buys a lot, puts up a store and makes the town sit up and take notice. His success goes to his head—their life becomes a mockery of her high hopes. And after his death, she goes off with a youth who brings her happiness and tragedy. A poignant story, told with almost rhythmic beauty.

Pub Date: Sept. 16, 1937

ISBN: 0060199490

Page Count: 231

Publisher: Lippincott

Review Posted Online: Sept. 26, 2011

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 1937

GENERAL FICTION

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A LITTLE LIFE

by Hanya Yanagihara ‧ RELEASE DATE: March 10, 2015

The phrase “tour de force” could have been invented for this audacious novel.

Four men who meet as college roommates move to New York and spend the next three decades gaining renown in their professions—as an architect, painter, actor and lawyer—and struggling with demons in their intertwined personal lives.

Yanagihara ( The People in the Trees , 2013) takes the still-bold leap of writing about characters who don’t share her background; in addition to being male, JB is African-American, Malcolm has a black father and white mother, Willem is white, and “Jude’s race was undetermined”—deserted at birth, he was raised in a monastery and had an unspeakably traumatic childhood that’s revealed slowly over the course of the book. Two of them are gay, one straight and one bisexual. There isn’t a single significant female character, and for a long novel, there isn’t much plot. There aren’t even many markers of what’s happening in the outside world; Jude moves to a loft in SoHo as a young man, but we don’t see the neighborhood change from gritty artists’ enclave to glitzy tourist destination. What we get instead is an intensely interior look at the friends’ psyches and relationships, and it’s utterly enthralling. The four men think about work and creativity and success and failure; they cook for each other, compete with each other and jostle for each other’s affection. JB bases his entire artistic career on painting portraits of his friends, while Malcolm takes care of them by designing their apartments and houses. When Jude, as an adult, is adopted by his favorite Harvard law professor, his friends join him for Thanksgiving in Cambridge every year. And when Willem becomes a movie star, they all bask in his glow. Eventually, the tone darkens and the story narrows to focus on Jude as the pain of his past cuts deep into his carefully constructed life.  

Pub Date: March 10, 2015

ISBN: 978-0-385-53925-8

Page Count: 720

Publisher: Doubleday

Review Posted Online: Dec. 21, 2014

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2015

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by Hanya Yanagihara

PERSPECTIVES

by Elin Hilderbrand ‧ RELEASE DATE: June 16, 2015

Once again, Hilderbrand displays her gift for making us care most about her least likable characters.

Hilderbrand’s latest cautionary tale exposes the toxic—and hilarious—impact of gossip on even the most sophisticated of islands.

Eddie and Grace Pancik are known for their beautiful Nantucket home and grounds, financed with the profits from Eddie’s thriving real estate company (thriving before the crash of 2008, that is). Grace raises pedigreed hens and, with the help of hunky landscape architect Benton Coe, has achieved a lush paradise of fowl-friendly foliage. The Panciks’ teenage girls, Allegra and Hope, suffer invidious comparisons of their looks and sex appeal, although they're identical twins. The Panciks’ friends the Llewellyns (Madeline, a blocked novelist, and her airline-pilot husband, Trevor) invested $50,000, the lion’s share of Madeline’s last advance, in Eddie’s latest development. But Madeline, hard-pressed to come up with catalog copy, much less a new novel, is living in increasingly straightened circumstances, at least by Nantucket standards: she can only afford $2,000 per month on the apartment she rents in desperate hope that “a room of her own” will prime the creative pump. Construction on Eddie’s spec houses has stalled, thanks to the aforementioned crash. Grace, who has been nursing a crush on Benton for some time, gives in and a torrid affair ensues, which she ill-advisedly confides to Madeline after too many glasses of Screaming Eagle. With her agent and publisher dropping dire hints about clawing back her advance and Eddie “temporarily” unable to return the 50K, what’s a writer to do but to appropriate Grace’s adultery as fictional fodder? When Eddie is seen entering her apartment (to ask why she rented from a rival realtor), rumors spread about him and Madeline, and after the rival realtor sneaks a look at Madeline’s rough draft (which New York is hotly anticipating as “the Playboy Channel meets HGTV”), the island threatens to implode with prurient snark. No one is spared, not even Hilderbrand herself, “that other Nantucket novelist,” nor this magazine, “the notoriously cranky Kirkus.”

Pub Date: June 16, 2015

ISBN: 978-0-316-33452-5

Page Count: 384

Publisher: Little, Brown

Review Posted Online: May 20, 2015

Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2015

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Book Reviews

Their Eyes Were Watching God by Zora Neale Hurston: Book Review

Janie Crawford is only 16 years old when her grandmother decides to marry her off to a man who is well-respected in the community. Nanny has had to work hard all her life and she wants Janie to have an easier life. She marries her off as soon as she notices boys noticing Janie. It comes from a place of love, but Janie wants to live life, not just settle for comfort. So she sets out to live the kind of life she wants to live.

You just have to admire Janie. My gosh, does she just take a big bite out of life and chew it with gusto! She does not have an easy time of it by any means. But she weathers the hard times and she wrings every drop of sweetness out of the good times. She learns early on that she shouldn’t be too concerned about what others think of her choices. She’s the one who has to live with her decisions, so she’s the only person she needs to please. And besides, you can’t make everybody happy, so why even try?

I already knew a little about the town of Eatonville, Florida,  the first incorporated all-black town in the US, from reading Zora and Me by Victoria Bond and T.R. Simon. That was getting a little out of order, but I did like reading this and seeing where some of Bond and Simon’s ideas about the young Zora came from. The town and the alligator stories were especially interesting to me.

I did have a little bit of a hard time with the dialect that the book is written in. I think for about the first half of the book, I was laboriously sounding out each word and translating it in my head. I finally learned to just let go. I could read at pretty much my normal speed and still understand everything. I wish I had managed to do that earlier.

There was some beautiful writing in here.

“When God had made The Man, he made him out of stuff that sung all the time and glittered all over. Some angels got jealous and chopped him into millions of pieces, but still he glittered and hummed. So they beat him down to nothing but sparks but each little spark had a shine and a song. So they covered each one over with mud. And the lonesomeness in the sparks make them hunt for one another.”

“It is so easy to be hopeful in the daytime when you can see the things you wish on. But it was night, it stayed night. Night was striding across nothingness with the whole round world in his hands . . . They sat in company with the others in other shanties, their eyes straining against cruel walls and their souls asking if He meant to measure their puny might against His. They seemed to be staring at the dark, but their eyes were watching God.”

“She was stretched on her back beneath the pear tree soaking in the alto chant of the visiting bees, the gold of the sun and the panting breath of the breeze when the inaudible voice of it all came to her. She saw a dust-bearing bee sink into the sanctum of a bloom; the thousand sister-calyxes arch to meet the love embrace and the ecstatic shiver of the tree from root to tiniest branch creaming in every blossom and frothing with delight.”

Take some time to get acquainted with this book and you will meet a character whom you won’t soon forget. Highly recommended.

According to the ALA website , Their Eyes Were Watching God was “Challenged for sexual explicitness, but retained on the Stonewall Jackson High School’s academically advanced reading list in Brentsville, VA (1997). A parent objected to the novel’s language and sexual explicitness.”

Janie is a woman who learns to enjoy life and everything it has to offer. I personally wouldn’t call her promiscuous, although I know others would disagree with me. Sex with someone you love is a beautiful part of life; it would have felt wrong if it wasn’t in there. And besides, I think that there are more explicit scenes on tv everyday, not to mention movies.

Read an excerpt .

Read for the following challenges: Southern Literature Off the Shelf Page to Screen Heroine’s Book Shelf

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The Harlem Renaissance Through Zora Neale Hurston’s Eyes

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By Jabari Asim

• Jan. 14, 2020

HITTING A STRAIGHT LICK WITH A CROOKED STICK Stories From the Harlem Renaissance By Zora Neale Hurston

Early in Reginald Hudlin’s 2017 biopic about Thurgood Marshall , Zora Neale Hurston makes a memorable cameo appearance. The soon-to-be legendary attorney and his wife are sharing a booth at a nightclub with Langston Hughes and a friend when Hurston saunters in. Portrayed by the R&B star Rozonda “Chilli” Thomas, she looks as if she’s stepped out of a Carl Van Vechten portrait, oozing confidence and sly intelligence. The brief scene in “Marshall,” with its cutting repartee, suggests what Hurston admirers have long known: She would have been some kind of star even if she’d never parked her genius in front of a typewriter. But how fortunate we are that she did. Today she is revered as a peerless raconteur, intrepid investigator of culture and ritual, and author of a great American novel, “Their Eyes Were Watching God.”

“Hitting a Straight Lick With a Crooked Stick,” edited and with an introduction by Genevieve West, with a foreword by Tayari Jones, helps illuminate Hurston’s path to iconic status. Its 21 stories are presented in the order in which she composed them. As a result, readers can note the progression from earnest “apprentice” works and experiments with form to the polished brilliance of her best-known stories. The latter include “The Gilded Six-Bits,” with its plot turning on heartbreak and betrayal; “Spunk,” a spooky adultery fable drenched in swagger; and “Sweat,” a nail-biting tale of domestic terror.

West is primarily interested in the eight “recovered” stories that unfold in Northern places like Harlem. She notes that their settings, far from Hurston’s well-known Eatonville, Fla., locale, “reflect the tumult of the Great Migration,” expanding our understanding of Hurston’s fictional territory. She also points out that stories like “The Book of Harlem” differed from Hurston’s fellow writers’ treatments of the epic journey from South to North by persistently flashing elements of wit. Just as Ralph Ellison sought to wring the marvelous from the terrible, Hurston boldly found humor in the midst of tragedy and disruption. All the while, she recognized that what a black audience found comic could be a double-edged blade, easily confusing uninformed audiences. (At the end of the intense “Six-Bits,” Hurston shows a white character blithely assessing what he believes to be the typical black personality: “Wisht I could be like those darkies. Laughin’ all the time. Nothin’ worries ’em.”)

[ Read an excerpt from “Hitting a Straight Lick with a Crooked Stick.” ]

Explaining the meaning of Hurston’s homespun title, West cites Hurston’s various definitions of the expression. Of those, my favorite is “making a way out of no-way.” Equally a part of Northern, Midwestern and Southern African-American culture, the saying recognizes our ancestors’ ability to survive and thrive in the most challenging circumstances. In many of the stories in this collection, Hurston’s men and women confront those challenges while also trying and failing at love, then trying again.

Hurston is equally insistent on displaying the bruised, bloody underside of romantic misadventure. “Everybody in the country cut the fool over husbands and wives — violence was the rule,” she writes in “The Country in the Woman.” Men aren’t the only ones who provoke mayhem, but they flaunt their willingness to live by their fists. And meat-axes. And pistols. (West calls this behavior “tyrannical masculinity”; she does not exaggerate.) Hurston’s willingness to show warts and wounds ran counter to black bourgeois sensitivities about revealing dirty laundry in public. Against the backdrop of Harlem Renaissance bigwigs calling for positive depictions of high-achieving Negroes, Hurston unpacked the lives of everyday black people doing everyday things.

Add her matchless powers of observation, exemplary fidelity to idiomatic speech and irresistible engagement with folklore, and the outcome is a collection of value to more than Hurston completists. Any addition to her awe-inspiring oeuvre should be met with open arms.

Jabari Asim directs the M.F.A. program in creative writing at Emerson College. His latest book is “We Can’t Breathe: On Black Lives, White Lies, and the Art of Survival.”

HITTING A STRAIGHT LICK WITH A CROOKED STICK Stories From the Harlem Renaissance By Zora Neale Hurston 252 pp. Amistad/HarperCollins Publishers. $25.99.

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Read the first reviews of Their Eyes Were Watching God .

They sat in company with the others in other shanties, their eyes straining against cruel walls and their souls asking if He meant to measure their puny might against His. They seemed to be staring at the dark, but their eyes were watching God.

Now considered one of the greatest novels of the 20th century, Zora Neale Hurston’s Their Eyes Were Watching God  had to travel a rocky road to immortality. Initial reviews ranged from positive to condescending to downright hostile, as many in the African American literary community bristled at Hurston’s rejection of the Harlem Renaissance and W.E.B. Du Bois’ Uplift agenda. A decades-long wilderness period in which both the novel and its author fell into obscurity ended with the establishment of several Black Studies programs in universities across America in the 1970s and 1980s. This, coupled with a growing black feminist movement, spearheaded by activist writers like Audre Lorde and Alice Walker, helped create a space in which Hurston’s work could be rediscovered. Walker’s 1975 essay, “ Looking for Zora ,” in which she chronicled her search for Hurston’s unmarked grave, was a particularly significant part of this effort.

86 years on from its publication, we take look back at some of the original reviews of Their Eyes Were Watching God.

“Whether or not there was ever a town in Florida inhabited and governed entirely by Negroes, you will have no difficulty believing in the Negro community which Zora Neale Hurston has either reconstructed or imagined in this novel. The town of Eatonville is as real in these pages as Jacksonville is in the pages of Rand McNally; and the lives of its people are rich, racy, and authentic. The few white characters in the book appear momentarily and incidentally. The title carries a suggestion of The Green Pastures , but it is to this extent misleading; no religious element dominates this story of human relationships … The only weak spots in the novel are technical; it begins awkwardly with a confusing and unnecessary preview of the end; and the dramatic action, as in the story of the hurricane, is sometimes hurriedly and clumsily handled. Otherwise the narration is exactly right, because most of it is in dialogue, and the dialogue gives us a constant sense of character in action. No one has ever reported the speech of Negroes with a more accurate ear for its raciness, its rich invention, and its music.”

–George Stevens,  The Saturday Review of Literature , September 18, 1937

“Miss Hurston seems to have no desire whatever to move in the direction of serious fiction … Miss Hurston can write, but her prose is cloaked in that facile sensuality that has dogged Negro expression since the days of Phillis Wheatley. Her dialogue manages to catch the psychological movements of the Negro folk-mind in their pure simplicity, but that’s as far as it goes. Miss Hurston  voluntarily  continues in her novel the tradition which was  forced  upon the Negro in the theatre, that is, the minstrel technique that makes the ‘white folks’ laugh. Her characters eat and laugh and cry and work and kill; they swing like a pendulum eternally in that safe and narrow orbit in which America likes to see the Negro live: between laughter and tears … The sensory sweep of her novel carries no theme, no message, no thought. In the main, her novel is not addressed to the Negro, but to a white audience whose chauvinistic tastes she knows how to satisfy. She exploits that phase of Negro life which is ‘quaint,’ the phase which evokes a piteous smile on the lips of the ‘superior’ race.”

–Richard Wright,  The New Masses , October 5, 1937

“This is Zora Hurston’s third novel, again about her own people–and it is beautiful. It is about Negroes, and a good deal of it is written in dialect, but really it is about everyone, or least everyone who isn’t so civilized that he has lost the capacity for glory … The story of Janie’s life down on the muck of Florida Glades, bean picking, hunting and the men shooting dice in the evening and how the hurricane came up and drove the animals and the Indians and finally the black people and the white people before it, and how Tea Cake, in Janie’s eyes the ‘son of Evening Son,’ and incidentally the best crap shooter in the place, made Janie sing and glitter all over at last, is a little epic all by itself. Indeed, from first to last this is a well nigh perfect story–a little sententious at the start, but the rest is simple and beautiful and shining with humor. In case there are readers who have a chronic laziness about dialect, it should be added that the dialect here is very easy to follow, and the images it carries are irresistible.”

–Lucille Tompkins,  New York Times Book Review , September 26, 1937

“It isn’t that this novel is bad, but that it deserves to be better. In execution it is too complex and wordily pretty, even dull—yet its conception of these simple Florida Negroes is unaffected and really beautiful … Through these chapters there has been some very shrewd picturing of Negro life in its naturally creative and unself-conscious grace … If this isn’t as grand as it should he, the breakdown comes in the conflict between the true vision and its overliterary expression. Crises of feeling are rushed over too quickly for them to catch hold, and then presently we are in a tangle of lush exposition and overblown symbols; action is described and characters are talked about, and everything is more heard than seen. The speech is founded in observation and sometimes wonderfully so, a gold mine of traditional sayings…But although the spoken word is remembered, it is not passed on. Dialect is really sloppy, in fact…And so all this conflict between the real life we want to read about and the superwordy, flabby lyric discipline we are so sick of leaves a good story where it never should have been potentially: in the gray category of neuter gender, declension indefinite.”

–Otis Ferguson,  The New Republic , October 13, 1937

“And now, Zora Neale Hurston and her magical title:  Their Eyes Were Watching God . Janie’s story should not be re-told; it must be read. But as always thus far with this talented writer, setting and surprising flashes of contemporary folk lore are the main point. Her gift for poetic phrase, for rare dialect, and folk humor keep her flashing on the surface of her community and her characters and from diving down deep either to the inner psychology of characterization or to sharp analysis of the social background. It is folklore fiction at its best, which we gratefully accept as an overdue replacement for so much faulty local color fiction about Negroes. But when will the Negro novelist of maturity, who knows how to tell a story convincingly — which is Miss Hurston’s cradle gift, come to grips with motive fiction and social document fiction? Progressive southern fiction has already banished the legend of these entertaining pseudo-primitives whom the reading public still loves to laugh with, weap over and envy. Having gotten rid of condescension, let us now get over oversimplication!”

–Alain Locke,  Opportunity , June 1, 1938

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Their Eyes Were Watching God

In part eight of Books That Shaped America , Vanderbilt University history Professor Tiffany Ruby Patterson examined Their Eyes Were Watching … read more

In part eight of Books That Shaped America , Vanderbilt University history Professor Tiffany Ruby Patterson examined Their Eyes Were Watching God , a 1937 novel authored by Zora Neale Hurston that explores a southern woman’s identify, along with gender roles and race, and was influential on both African American literature and women’s literature. The program also includes a tour of Eatonville, Florida, where the novel is set, with the executive director of the Hurston National Museum of Fine Arts; remarks from Professor Gary Richards on the life of Hurston; a short interview with the author of Zora Neale Hurston: A Life in Letters ; a high school teacher who described how she teaches Hurston in her class; and comments from an archivist at the University of Florida. Books That Shaped America is a 10-part series, created in partnership with the Library of Congress, that examines major works of literature that have had a significant impact on the country and public policy. close

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Introduction to "Their Eyes Were Watching God”

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Zora Neale Hurston and the Harlem Renaissance

Life in the United States in the 19th - 20th Centuries

Zora Neale Hurston Themes

Their eyes were watching God: Unveiling the complexities of self discovery and independence

"Ships at a distance have every man's wish on board", the first line of novel "Their Eyes Were Watching God" by Zora Neale Hurston, is a beautifully crafted sentence that holds significant meaning and sets the tone for the entire book.

Meaning of the First Line:

The line "Ships at a distance have every man's wish on board" can be interpreted in several ways:

Literal Interpretation : This phrase suggests that people often associate distant ships with hopes, dreams, and opportunities. When a ship is far away on the horizon, it represents the potential for adventure, new beginnings, and the fulfillment of desires.

Metaphorical Interpretation : Beyond the literal ships, it speaks to the idea that people tend to project their hopes and dreams onto distant, seemingly unattainable things. It encapsulates the human tendency to believe that something better awaits us in the future, often far away from our current circumstances.

Connection to the Title:

The title of the book, "Their Eyes Were Watching God," also reflects a sense of longing, searching, and yearning for something beyond the ordinary. The first line's imagery of distant ships ties in with this theme. Throughout the novel, the protagonist, Janie Crawford, embarks on a journey of self-discovery and independence, seeking to find her own voice and define her identity. Her journey is metaphorically represented by the idea of "watching God," which implies a quest for meaning and purpose.

Relation to the Story and Characters:

Janie Crawford: The first line mirrors Janie's personal journey throughout the novel. Like the ships in the distance, Janie has her own dreams and desires. She seeks a fulfilling and authentic life, even though societal expectations and relationships often constrain her. Her story is about breaking free from those constraints and finding her true self.

Other Characters: This line can also be applied to other characters in the novel, who have their own wishes and desires. Each character is on their own journey, and their paths intersect with Janie's at various points, influencing her choices and experiences.

Themes: The line foreshadows and encapsulates several themes in the novel, including the pursuit of happiness, the quest for identity, the impact of societal expectations, and the significance of individual agency in shaping one's destiny.

The first line serves as a rich and symbolic opening that sets the stage for the exploration of desires, dreams, and self-discovery throughout the novel. It connects with the title's themes and foreshadows the central character's journey, making it a powerful and evocative introduction to the story.

The novel explores themes of identity, race, gender, and the complexities of love, offering a profound examination of the human condition. Through Janie's trials and triumphs, readers are invited to reflect on the enduring quest for personal fulfillment and the courage it takes to break free from societal constraints. "Their Eyes Were Watching God" stands as a timeless masterpiece of American literature, celebrated for its powerful prose and its enduring relevance in discussions of race, gender, and self-determination.

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