The Novel I Found Twenty Years Late and Cannot Forgive Myself For

I was 34 when I first read Zora Neale Hurston and the feeling I had when I finished Their Eyes Were Watching God was grief about the years I had not been reading it. The novel is about Janie Crawford, a Black woman in early twentieth-century Florida who lives three marriages and refuses to let any of them define her. Hurston's prose is unlike anything else in American literature: specific, lyrical, and written in the dialect of the people it is about with complete respect for that language.