zora neale hurston their eyes were watching god book

The novel begins with Janie Crawford sharing her life story with her friend Pheoby. It's set in Florida in the early 20th Century, at the height of Jim Crow. While this theory doesn't give her much agency, it does fit with her search for a life outside of others' expectations (except God's). I’ve been reading about the idea that the title implies how Janie must look to God - not white people, not husbands, not well-meaning family members - to determine her future. Now I'm fascinated by interpretations of the title because religion and God don't feature much in the story at all. It's a wonderful, lyrical tale of a woman's life and search for independence.

I've spent many years wanting to read this book, but also not wanting to read it because the title made me think it was going to be heavy on religion, which is something I generally avoid in books. Janie saw her life like a giant tree in leaf with the things suffered, things enjoyed, things done and undone. Hurston also contributed to Woman in the Suwanee County Jail, a book by journalist and civil rights advocate William Bradford Huie. In 1954, the Pittsburgh Courier assigned Hurston, unable to sell her fiction, 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. Her significant work ably broke into the secret societies and exposed their use of drugs to create the Vodun trance, also a subject of study for fellow dancer-anthropologist Katherine Dunham, then at the University of Chicago. People awarded a Guggenheim fellowship to Hurston to travel to Haiti and conduct research on conjure in 1937. She also assembled a folk-based performance dance group that recreated her Southern tableau with one performance on Broadway. Hurston applied her Barnard ethnographic training to document African American folklore in her critically acclaimed book Mules and Men alongside fiction Their Eyes Were Watching God.

This literary movement developed into the Harlem renaissance. In 1925, Hurston, one of the leaders of the literary renaissance, happening in Harlem, produced the short-lived literary magazine Fire!! alongside Langston Hughes and Wallace Thurman shortly before she entered Barnard College. Novels, including Their Eyes Were Watching God (1937), and nonfiction writings of American folklorist Zora Neale Hurston give detailed accounts of African American life in the South.

Zora neale hurston their eyes were watching god book