Editors Reads Verdict
Hurston's masterpiece, dismissed by her contemporaries and rescued by Alice Walker, is now recognised as one of American literature's most important novels. Janie's journey is a Black woman's assertion of the right to define herself — and the prose that carries it is among the most beautiful in the language.
What We Loved
- The lyrical Black vernacular prose is unlike anything else in American literature
- Janie's interior journey is rendered with psychological depth and genuine feminist force
- The Florida communities are documented with the ethnographer's eye (Hurston was trained by Franz Boas)
- Tea Cake is one of American fiction's most charming and genuinely complex love interests
Minor Drawbacks
- The novel was criticised on publication for its depiction of Black speech — the debate continues
- The ending is necessarily sad, but its inevitability can feel somewhat mechanical
- Some early critics (Richard Wright among them) felt the novel avoided social protest in favour of romance
Key Takeaways
- → A woman's self-definition cannot be delegated to any husband, however loving
- → The pear tree — Janie's vision of ideal love — is the standard against which all actual relationships are measured
- → Black vernacular speech carries as much wisdom and beauty as any literary register
- → Love that is also equality — Tea Cake's relationship with Janie — is the novel's highest value
- → Janie's story, told retrospectively to her friend Pheoby, insists on the primacy of experience over reputation
| Author | Zora Neale Hurston |
|---|---|
| Publisher | Harper Perennial |
| Pages | 286 |
| Published | September 18, 1937 |
| Language | English |
| Genre | Fiction, Classic Literature, American Literature |
| Difficulty | Beginner |
| Best For | Every reader who values great prose and psychological depth — and particularly those interested in the intersection of race, gender, and self-determination in American literature. |
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.
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.
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