Their Eyes Were Watching God

The Novel That Was Lost and Found

Zora Neale Hurston published Their Eyes Were Watching God in 1937 and it was immediately controversial: Richard Wright, the dominant voice of Black American fiction, dismissed it for its failure to engage with social protest. Langston Hughes was cool to it. Hurston herself died in obscurity in 1960, in a welfare home in Florida.

Then Alice Walker found the novel in 1975 — or rather, found Hurston herself, sought out her unmarked grave in Fort Pierce, placed a marker on it — and wrote an essay that changed the canon. By the 1980s Their Eyes Were Watching God was being taught in universities across America, and by now it is widely considered one of the most important American novels of the twentieth century.

Janie’s Three Marriages

The novel follows Janie Crawford from adolescence to her forties, through three marriages that represent progressive stages of her self-discovery. Her first husband, Logan Killicks, is a respectable farmer her grandmother chose for her safety — practical, unromantic, treating her as property. Her second, Joe Starks, is ambitious and domineering — he builds a town and becomes its mayor, and in doing so silences Janie into a beautiful ornament. Her third, Tea Cake Woods, is younger, poorer, and utterly different: he treats Janie as a partner, teaches her to shoot and play checkers, includes her in his life.

Tea Cake’s relationship with Janie is the novel’s emotional centre and its most complex achievement: genuinely tender and genuinely equal, but also imperfect — Tea Cake has a jealous streak, gambles Janie’s money, once strikes her to prove ownership to a rival. Hurston presents this complexity without resolving it sentimentally.

The Prose

What makes the novel permanently unmistakable is its prose — a synthesis of Black Southern vernacular and lyrical literary English that renders experience from the inside out. “Ships at a distance have every man’s wish on board,” the novel opens. “For some they come in with the tide. For others they sail forever on the horizon, never out of sight, never landing until the Watcher turns his eyes away in resignation, his dreams mocked to death by Time. That is the life of men. Now, women forget all those things they don’t want to remember and remember everything they don’t want to forget. The dream is the truth. Then they act and do things accordingly.”

This opening — which has no equivalent in American fiction — announces a prose style that combines folk wisdom, lyrical beauty, and psychological precision in a way that only Hurston could manage.

The Hurricane

The novel’s most dramatically powerful sequence is the hurricane that strikes the Florida Everglades, forcing Janie and Tea Cake to flee through floodwaters, leading to Tea Cake’s infection with rabies from a dog bite, and ultimately to Janie’s need to shoot the man she loves as the disease destroys his mind. The hurricane section is surrealist and documentary simultaneously — Hurston the trained anthropologist and Hurston the lyric writer operating at the same pitch.

A Woman Finding Her Voice

For all its romance, the novel’s deepest subject is not love but voice — Janie’s slow movement from a silence imposed by others toward a self she chooses and can finally speak. Her grandmother marries her off for safety; Joe Starks orders her to tie up her hair and keep quiet on the store porch where the men tell their tales. The turning point is not a marriage at all but the moment Janie finds the courage to answer back, claiming her right to speak and to feel. Hurston frames the whole story as Janie’s own telling: returned to Eatonville after Tea Cake’s death and the trial that acquits her, she recounts everything to her friend Pheoby on the porch, insisting that her experience belongs to her and not to the gossiping townspeople. The structure itself enacts the theme — a Black woman seizing narrative authority over her own life, in an era when that authority was rarely granted on the page or off it.

Anthropology, Lyricism, and a Contested Legacy

Hurston wrote from a unique vantage: trained as an anthropologist under Franz Boas at Columbia, she had collected folklore across the rural South, and the novel’s Florida communities — the all-Black town of Eatonville where she grew up, the migrant labor of the Everglades “muck” — are rendered with a documentary precision that no outsider could fake. Yet she fused that ethnographer’s accuracy with a lyricism entirely her own, and that fusion was exactly what some contemporaries could not forgive. Richard Wright accused the book of pandering to white readers and avoiding racial protest; the dispute between his social-realist vision and Hurston’s celebration of Black interior life and folk beauty remains one of the defining arguments in African American letters. Time has vindicated Hurston. Rescued by Alice Walker, embraced by generations of readers, adapted for film by Oprah Winfrey in 2005, Their Eyes Were Watching God is now a cornerstone of the American canon and a foundational text for Black women’s writing. Writers from Toni Morrison to Edwidge Danticat work in the space Hurston opened, and her insistence that Black vernacular speech could carry the full weight of literary art — that the way people actually talked on a Florida porch was as worthy of the page as any received literary register — has shaped the sound of American fiction ever since. What her contemporaries mistook for a lack of seriousness, we now recognise as a different and deeper kind: the radical seriousness of treating a Black woman’s inner life, her desire, and her self-possession as a subject worthy of the most beautiful prose in the language.

Our rating: 4.7/5 — One of American literature’s great recoveries: a novel whose beauty and moral force have only grown clearer with time.