Their Eyes Were Watching God

Zora Neale Hurston published Their Eyes Were Watching God in 1937 in seven weeks, while conducting anthropological fieldwork in Haiti. That speed of composition is partly visible in the novel’s occasional unevenness, but it is also present in the quality that makes the book endure: a confidence and directness of vision that comes from complete command of one’s material.

The novel follows Janie Crawford from childhood through three marriages-the arranged, joyless union with Logan Killicks; the socially ambitious marriage to Joe Starks, mayor of an all-Black Florida town; and the passionate, dangerous love affair with Tea Cake, a younger man-to the novel’s end, when she sits on a porch and tells her story to her friend Pheoby. The narrative structure-retrospective, oral, communal-reflects Hurston’s theoretical commitments as an anthropologist of African American folk culture.

The prose moves between free indirect discourse and dialect in ways that were deeply controversial in Hurston’s time: Richard Wright accused her of writing minstrelsy; Alice Walker revived the novel in the 1970s and called it a literary miracle. Walker was right. Hurston’s dialect is not condescension but celebration-a rendering of African American vernacular speech as living literature, as beautiful and as precise as any standard English.

Janie’s development from an object of others’ ambitions to a woman who lives on her own terms is one of American fiction’s most satisfying arcs, and the novel’s famous final image-the horizon returning to the self-is an earned image, one that the preceding narrative has prepared for across its length.