Their Eyes Were Watching God
by Zora Neale Hurston
The recap
At dusk, the porch-sitters of Eatonville, Florida, watch Janie Crawford walk back into town in muddy overalls, and the gossip starts before she reaches her gate. Only her old friend Pheoby gets the real story, and Janie tells it from the beginning: a girlhood under her grandmother's protective eye, a marriage arranged for security rather than love, and a lifelong longing for the kind of blossoming, mutual passion she once imagined beneath a pear tree. Her search carries her through the early days of an all-Black town, the confining role of a big man's wife, and out to the fertile, perilous Everglades with a younger, laughing drifter called Tea Cake. Hurston writes in a lush, musical blend of lyrical narration and vivid Southern Black speech, giving voice to a woman who insists on loving on her own terms. It is a romance, a coming-of-age story and a declaration of independence all at once.
Why read it
For readers who want a love story told with poetry and grit, and anyone drawn to a heroine who refuses to let other people define her happiness.
Fun facts
- 01
Hurston wrote the novel in roughly seven weeks in Haiti in 1936, while she was there on a Guggenheim Fellowship.
- 02
Alice Walker's 1975 Ms. magazine essay In Search of Zora Neale Hurston is credited with reviving interest in Hurston's work; Walker even found her unmarked grave in Florida and paid for a headstone.
- 03
In 2005, Time named it one of the 100 best English-language novels published since 1923.
- 04
An Oprah Winfrey Presents TV film starring Halle Berry as Janie aired on ABC in 2005 and drew 24.6 million viewers.
