Editor Reviews:

Product Description:

One of the most important works of twentieth-century American literature, Zora Neale Hurston's beloved 1937 classic, Their Eyes Were Watching God, is an enduring Southern love story sparkling with wit, beauty, and heartfelt wisdom. Told in the captivating voice of a woman who refuses to live in sorrow, bitterness, fear, or foolish romantic dreams, it is the story of fair-skinned, fiercely independent Janie Crawford, and her evolving selfhood through three marriages and a life marked by poverty, trials, and purpose. A true literary wonder, Hurston's masterwork remains as relevant and affecting today as when it was first published -- perhaps the most widely read and highly regarded novel in the entire canon of African American literature.

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.

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

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 academic work as a folklorist and anthropologist, it only takes a few pages before you realize that you're in the hands of a master. The hundreds of people who have taken the time to review this book testify to its impact--once you're done with it, it evokes a compulsion to share the experience.

The brilliance of the book is only enhanced by its brevity. You can easily read it in a sitting, although you'll find yourself lingering on some of the pages as you turn over the expressiveness and beautiful language phrase by phrase. So many reviewers have summed up the story's plot, I'll leave that description to a single line: beautiful love story, crafted by genius.

"Their Eyes Were Watching God" is amazing when read as the resurrection of a woman's spirit, and just as amazing when read as the resurrection of a tremendous writer from the South. The hard ending of the love story and the irony of its demise at the fangs of a mad dog are a tragic parallel to the end of Hurston's own life, a literary genius educated at Barnard who died impoverished and old, working as a maid in Florida.

Alice Walker was so influenced by Hurston that she searched out her weedy grave and marked it with a headstone, from one great writer to another it says: Zora Neale Hurston, Genius of the South, Novelist Folklorist Anthropologist, 1891-1960.