Zora Neale Hurston wrote Their Eyes Were Watching God in a matter of weeks while on a Guggenheim-funded folklore trip to Haiti, and J. B. Lippincott published it on September 18, 1937. Framed as Janie Crawford's retrospective telling to her friend Pheoby, the novel follows Janie from her grandmother Nanny's yard in West Florida through three marriages: to Logan Killicks, chosen for her security; to Joe Starks, the ambitious mayor of the all-Black town of Eatonville, who silences her for twenty years; and to Vergible "Tea Cake" Woods, the younger gambler and laborer with whom, in the Everglades muck, she finally finds speech, desire, and partnership — and whom she is forced to shoot when rabies drives him mad. Hurston, an anthropologist trained under Franz Boas, built the novel out of Black Southern vernacular, folklore, and the Eatonville world of her childhood, and made its form — a woman narrating her own becoming — as significant as its plot. Poorly received by some leading Black critics of the day and out of print for decades, it was recovered in the 1970s, notably through Alice Walker's advocacy, and is now among the most widely taught American novels.
Author: Zora Neale Hurston · Original publisher: J. B. Lippincott Company (Philadelphia), 1937
