Zora Neale Hurston

Zora Neale Hurston was an American novelist, folklorist, and anthropologist whose Their Eyes Were Watching God is one of the most celebrated novels of the Harlem Renaissance and American literature.

Zora Neale Hurston was a central figure of the Harlem Renaissance — a movement, writer, and personality of extraordinary vitality who worked simultaneously as a novelist, short story writer, anthropologist, and folklorist. Trained at Barnard College under the anthropologist Franz Boas, she spent years conducting fieldwork in the American South and the Caribbean, collecting Black American folklore, music, and practice that she believed were being lost. This scholarly work informed her fiction in deep ways: Their Eyes Were Watching God and her other fiction are saturated in the verbal culture, music, and communal life she documented.

Their Eyes Were Watching God (1937) follows Janie Crawford through three marriages and her own self-discovery across the rural South and Florida’s Caribbean-influenced Eatonville — the all-Black town where Hurston herself grew up. The novel is remarkable for the quality of its vernacular dialogue, for the centrality of Janie’s interiority and desire in a way that was unusual for its time, and for the lyrical intensity of its prose, which shifts seamlessly between narrative voice and the speech patterns of the community Hurston loved. The sky, the pear tree, the horizon — Hurston’s imagery is specific and symbolic simultaneously.

Hurston died in poverty and relative obscurity in 1960 and was buried in an unmarked grave. Alice Walker’s 1975 essay “In Search of Zora Neale Hurston,” which described her journey to find and mark the grave, initiated a recovery of Hurston’s work that has resulted in her present canonical status. Richard Wright’s contemporary dismissal of Their Eyes Were Watching God for its lack of racial protest was influential in suppressing her reputation during her lifetime — a critical judgment that most readers and scholars now find seriously mistaken. She is now recognised as one of the essential American novelists.