Novel
Their Eyes Were Watching God
Zora Neale Hurston · 1937
Synopsis
Janie Crawford, in her forties, walks back to Eatonville, the small Black town in Florida she had left, in overalls and with her hair loose, under the gaze of the people sitting on their porches. She tells her life to her friend Pheoby: married very young by her grandmother to a farmer who owned sixty acres, then gone off with Joe Starks, who sets himself up in the budding town, gets himself elected mayor and forbids her to speak in public; then, widowed, gone off with Tea Cake, younger than she, to pick beans in the Everglades.
Context
The book was written in seven weeks in Haiti, in late 1936, during a stay financed by a Guggenheim fellowship, while its author was drifting away from the man she loved. It was published in September 1937. The white press praised it; Richard Wright and other Black critics reproached it for not dealing with racism. Out of print, it was forgotten along with its author. Alice Walker found the site of her grave in 1973 and had a stone placed there, and her 1975 essay revived the reading of the work; the novel has not been out of the bookshops since 1978.
Who it is for
A novel whose dialogue is written in the Black speech of the South, which is disorienting at first. Translated into French by Françoise Brodsky in 1993, then by Sika Fakambi in 2018.
Prizes and reception
Received with mixed feelings on publication, then out of print; rediscovered in the nineteen-seventies, it is now read in American high schools and universities.
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