📚 Book🏛️ Adults · Ages 18+Classic Novels

Their Eyes Were Watching God (1937)

About This Book

Janie Crawford, a Black woman in early twentieth century Florida, tells the story of her three marriages and her journey from a girl who dreamed of love under a blossoming pear tree to a woman who has survived a hurricane, a shooting, and a trial, and has found her own voice along the way. Zora Neale Hurston wrote the novel that was lost for decades before being rescued and recognized as one of the greatest achievements in American literature.

Why It's a Classic

Hurston's prose style, which blends literary English with the rhythms, vocabulary, and poetry of Black Southern vernacular speech, was revolutionary: she captured a voice that had been excluded from serious American fiction and demonstrated that it could carry the full weight of a major novel. Janie's three marriages track her evolution from passivity (her first marriage, arranged by her grandmother) through subjugation (her second, to the ambitious, controlling Joe Starks) to genuine partnership and passion (her third, with the younger, playful Tea Cake), and each relationship teaches her something about the difference between possession and love. The hurricane scene, in which Janie and Tea Cake confront the full force of nature and its indifference to human desire, is one of the most powerful set pieces in American fiction. The novel was dismissed by male contemporaries, including Richard Wright, who called it a 'minstrel show,' and it fell out of print until Alice Walker's 1975 essay 'In Search of Zora Neale Hurston' sparked a rediscovery that restored it to its rightful place in the American canon.

Fun Fact

Hurston wrote the novel in seven weeks while doing anthropological fieldwork in Haiti on a Guggenheim Fellowship, and the intensity of the writing period may account for the novel's concentrated emotional power. She was trained as an anthropologist by Franz Boas at Columbia University, and her academic study of Black Southern folklore directly influenced the novel's rich use of dialect and storytelling traditions. The novel was largely forgotten after Hurston's death in 1960 (she was buried in an unmarked grave in Fort Pierce, Florida), and Alice Walker traveled to Florida to find and mark the grave, an act of literary recovery that was itself a profound statement about how Black women's voices are erased and reclaimed.

Parent Note

The novel contains domestic violence (Joe Starks is controlling and strikes Janie), a hurricane that kills people and animals, a rabies infection, a shooting, and a trial. The racial language reflects early twentieth century Black Southern speech and includes terms that were acceptable within the community but may require context. The novel's treatment of gender dynamics is honest and sometimes painful. The dialect may require adjustment for some readers. The novel is roughly 200 pages. Suitable for readers fifteen and up. Essential American literature and one of the most important novels by a Black woman writer.