Their Eyes Were Watching God
Hurston wrote this in seven weeks. Every sentence sounds like music. Janie's journey is the most joyful and sorrowful thing simultaneously.
Janie's Horizon
Zora Neale Hurston's 1937 novel follows Janie Crawford, a Black woman in early 20th-century Florida, through three marriages and the long journey toward finding herself. Her first marriage is arranged, her second is suffocating, and her third with the reckless Tea Cake brings her fully alive. Written in African American vernacular that Hurston captured from her years as a trained anthropologist, the novel was misunderstood by contemporaries but was rediscovered and championed by Alice Walker in the 1970s. It is now considered the central work of the Harlem Renaissance.
Reading Their Eyes Were Watching God
Feeling
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Chapter
"There are years that ask questions and years that answer.
"Zora Neale Hurston
Hurston wrote the novel in Haiti in just seven weeks in 1936 while on a Guggenheim Fellowship studying Caribbean folklore and anthropology. She considered it her most successful work.
The novel was largely ignored after publication and out of print for decades. Alice Walker wrote a 1975 essay in Ms. Magazine titled Looking for Zora that sparked a revival, and it has been in print continuously ever since.