Work · African & Africana Philosophy
Their Eyes Were Watching God
Novel written during her fieldwork in Haiti: Janie Crawford tells Pheoby of three marriages and her search for love and a life of her own, from Eatonville to the Everglades; the dialogue keeps Black Southern speech, and the narration moves between it and standard English.
Introduction
Hurston wrote the novel in about seven weeks during her fieldwork in Haiti and published it in 1937. Janie Crawford returns to Eatonville and tells her friend Pheoby her story: a marriage arranged by her grandmother Nanny, who calls Black women “de mule uh de world”, a second marriage to the ambitious mayor Joe Starks, and a freer life with the younger Tea Cake in the Everglades that ends in tragedy after a hurricane. The book weaves the folklore Hurston had collected into the talk on the store porch. Richard Wright and Alain Locke faulted it for lacking social protest; since its rediscovery in the 1970s it has become a much-read text of African American literature and of Black feminist criticism.
More works by Zora Neale Hurston
- 1935Mules and Men
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