Their Eyes Were Watching God by Zora Neale Hurston Published by Harper Audio on November 7th 2005
Genres: Classic Literature and Fiction
Pages: 227
Format: Audiobook
ISBN: 0060199490
ASIN: B000C1X8GK
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āA deeply soulful novel that comprehends love and cruelty, and separates the big people from the small of heart, without ever losing sympathy for those unfortunates who donāt know how to live properly.ā āZadie Smith
One of the most important and enduring books of the twentieth century, Their Eyes Were Watching God brings to life a Southern love story with the wit and pathos found only in the writing of Zora Neale Hurston. Out of print for almost thirty yearsādue largely to initial audiencesā rejection of its strong black female protagonistāHurstonās classic has since its 1978 reissue become perhaps the most widely read and highly acclaimed novel in the canon of African-American literature.
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Their Eyes Were Watching God is the kind of book that makes me want to open with some profound statement that will send every one of you scurrying to download the audio version and start listening. The problem is there is nothing I can say that hasn’t already been said about this piece of literary art written by a woman recognized as great for her depictions of theĀ African-American experience. ZoraĀ Neale HurstonĀ is pure genius. You may have noticed that I specified audio version because I think you will be cheating yourself in at least a couple of ways if you choose to read rather than listen. First of all, the book is heavy with dialogue written in a dialect that will be unfamiliarĀ to many of you. Listening to someone perform the dialect not only brings the characters to lifeĀ but makes the author’s language clearer. Secondly, you don’t want to miss this brilliant performance by the late Ruby Dee. I remember her clearly from many of her other roles, but this may go down as my favorite.
It is difficult to get into a review of Their Eyes Were Watching God without skirting the edges of sensitive areas. Since I strenuously avoid inserting my personal beliefs and opinions into another person’s work, I will continue that here. The story itself is a coming of age for the character Janie Crawford, a young black girl in the 30’s. As she travels her road both literally and intellectually, there will be love and hate, there will be hardshipĀ and suffering, and there will be growth. The author conveys both theĀ tragedy and the humor of Janie’s experience with lyrical and heartrending prose that is at times almost poetic.Ā Because the author never presents Janie as pitiable, I think listenersĀ will readily sense her strength during aĀ time when strength in a woman wasn’t necessarily a trait to be admired.
There is a rich body of work by black authors from which I could have chosen a book to review. In an act of pure serendipity, I chose Their Eyes Were Watching God because of the title and because I loved the cover design, both of which I found to possess a rare beauty. I don’t think I could have chosen better from either a creative or a historical aspect. For a more in-depth analysis of this classic work, click hereĀ and/or here. This brief piece on the National Endowment for the Arts website is actually the review I wish I had written. I encourage you to read it.
About Zora Neale Hurston
Zora Neale Hurston was an American folklorist and author. In 1925, shortly before entering Barnard College, Hurston became one of the leaders of the literary renaissance happening in Harlem, producing the short-lived literary magazine Fire!! along with Langston Hughes and Wallace Thurman. This literary movement became the center of the Harlem Renaissance.
Hurston applied her Barnard ethnographic training to document African American folklore in her critically acclaimed book Mules and Men along with fiction Their Eyes Were Watching God and dance, assembling a folk-based performance group that recreated her Southern tableau, with one performance on Broadway.
Hurston was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship to travel to Haiti and conduct research on conjure in 1937. Her work was significant because she was able to break into the secret societies and expose their use of drugs to create the Vodun trance, also a subject of study for fellow dancer/anthropologist Katherine Dunham who was then at the University of Chicago.
In 1954 Hurston was unable to sell her fiction but was assigned by the Pittsburgh Courier to cover the small-town murder trial of Ruby McCollum, the prosperous black wife of the local lottery racketeer, who had killed a racist white doctor.
Hurston also contributed to Woman in the Suwanee County Jail, a book by journalist and civil rights advocate William Bradford Huie.
[…] on a Road by Zora Neale Hurston. I closed Black History Month 2018 with my review of her classic Their Eyes Were Watching God, so I decided to close Black History Month 2019 by digging a little deeper into the life of this […]