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Amazon.com Review: At the height of the Harlem Renaissance during the 1930s, Zora Neale Hurston was the preeminent black woman writer in the United States. She was a sometime-collaborator with Langston Hughes and a fierce rival of Richard Wright. Her stories appeared in major magazines, she consulted on Hollywood screenplays, and she penned four novels, an autobiography, countless essays, and two books on black mythology. Yet by the late 1950s, Hurston was living in obscurity, working as a maid in a Florida hotel. She died in 1960 in a Welfare home, was buried in an unmarked grave, and quickly faded from literary consciousness until 1975 when Alice Walker almost single-handedly revived interest in her work.
Of Hurston's fiction, Their Eyes Were Watching God is arguably the best-known and perhaps the most controversial. The novel follows the fortunes of Janie Crawford, a woman living in the black town of Eaton, Florida. Hurston sets up her characters and her locale in the first chapter, which, along with the last, acts as a framing device for the story of Janie's life. Unlike Wright and Ralph Ellison, Hurston does not write explicitly about black people in the context of a white world--a fact that earned her scathing criticism from the social realists--but she doesn't ignore the impact of black-white relations either:
It was the time for sitting on porches beside the road. It was the time to hear things and talk. These sitters had been tongueless, earless, eyeless conveniences all day long. Mules and other brutes had occupied their skins. But now, the sun and the bossman were gone, so the skins felt powerful and human. They became lords of sounds and lesser things. They passed nations through their mouths. They sat in judgment.
One person the citizens of Eaton are inclined to judge is Janie Crawford, who has married three men and been tried for the murder of one of them. Janie feels no compulsion to justify herself to the town, but she does explain herself to her friend, Phoeby, with the implicit understanding that Phoeby can "tell 'em what Ah say if you wants to. Dat's just de same as me 'cause mah tongue is in mah friend's mouf."
Hurston's use of dialect enraged other African American writers such as Wright, who accused her of pandering to white readers by giving them the black stereotypes they expected. Decades later, however, outrage has been replaced by admiration for her depictions of black life, and especially the lives of black women. In Their Eyes Were Watching God Zora Neale Hurston breathes humanity into both her men and women, and allows them to speak in their own voices. --Alix Wilber
Customer Reviews
Average Rating:
Rating: - World class fiction, quick
The only speedbump in this maddeningly addictive read is Hurston's rendering of dialect, spelled just as it's pronounced. Once you acclimate, and once you know that her writing was based on her astounding ... Read More
Rating: - A Beautiful Piece of Literature
I've never read anything so beautiful. The characters were so rich and the story was just perfect. Janie, the main character, was everything a woman is supposed to be, beautiful, confident, strong and capable. ... Read More
Rating: - Southern Florida in the early 20th century and one black woman's story
This 1937 novel has become a classic of its time. It is a mere 184 pages long, but the edition of the book I read is packed by commentary. I skipped this commentary because I wasn't particularly interested in ... Read More
Rating: - Among the Most Influential African-American Novels of the 20th Century
In Their Eyes Were Watching God, middle-aged narrator Janie Crawford tells the story of her life to date. Janie was raised by her former-slave grandmother, who pushed Janie into a life of quiet conventionality ... Read More
Rating: - Dreamy little novel
I still think fondly of this book, all the way back to high school. This is one of those incredible literary experiences that stays with you whether you loved it or hated it, and frankly I quite liked it.
... Read More
- World class fiction, quick
- Dreamy little novel