Their Eyes Were Watching God
by Zora Neale Hurston
Summary
Janie Crawford, back in the all Black Florida town of Eatonville after years away, tells her friend Phoeby the story of her life and her three marriages. Her grandmother, born enslaved, marries her off young to the farmer Logan Killicks for security rather than love; Janie leaves him for Joe Starks, a charismatic man who builds the town of Eatonville and becomes its mayor, but who treats Janie for twenty years as an ornament to be managed rather than a person to be known, and who dies still trying to control her from his sickbed. Only with Vergible Tea Cake Woods, a younger drifter and gambler who arrives in her life after Joe's death, does Janie find a marriage built on real partnership, though it is also volatile and at points violent. During the 1928 hurricane that floods the Everglades, Tea Cake is bitten by a rabid dog while saving Janie from drowning; as rabies takes hold weeks later he grows paranoid and eventually raises a gun to her, and Janie shoots him first in self defense. An all white jury acquits her, and the novel ends with Janie back home in Eatonville, at peace with the life she chose even as her neighbors gossip about her from their porches.
Hurston writes Janie's own voice in a richly detailed Black Southern vernacular, drawing on her training as an anthropologist to render speech patterns other novelists of the period either ignored or caricatured, and she frames the whole story as something Janie chooses to tell rather than something done to her. It reads warmly and, in its middle stretch, joyfully, the hurricane sequence building real dread before the quiet, hard won calm of its final pages.
Hurston set the novel largely in the real town of Eatonville, Florida, where she grew up, one of the first incorporated all Black towns in the United States, and she wrote most of the book in seven weeks while on a research trip to Haiti, working through her own recent heartbreak in the process.
Historical Context & Significance
J. B. Lippincott published Their Eyes Were Watching God in September 1937 to a mixed reception among Hurston's own Harlem Renaissance peers. Richard Wright, reviewing it in New Masses, dismissed the book's characters as living in the safe, narrow orbit white America preferred to imagine for Black life, and Ralph Ellison later criticized it in similar terms, even as other critics, among them the historian Carter G. Woodson, praised Hurston's skill and her anthropologist's eye for detail.
The novel drifted out of print for decades and Hurston herself died in 1960 in poverty, largely forgotten. Its revival began with Alice Walker's 1975 Ms. magazine essay In Search of Zora Neale Hurston, which sent readers back to a writer whose grave Walker had found unmarked and later marked as a genius of the South, and Robert Hemenway's 1977 biography helped push a 1978 reissue that sold seventy five thousand copies within a month. The novel is now taught as a landmark of American fiction, its rediscovery as central to its story as anything that happens inside the book itself.