Their Eyes Were Watching God
First edition
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| Author | Zora Neale Hurston |
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| Country | United States |
| Language | English |
| Publisher | J. B. Lippincott |
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Publication date
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September 18, 1937 |
| OCLC | 46429736 |
Their Eyes Were Watching God is a 1937 novel and the best known work by African-American writer Zora Neale Hurston. The novel narrates main character Janie Crawford's "ripening from a vibrant, but voiceless, teenage girl into a woman with her finger on the trigger of her own destiny." As a young woman, who is fair-skinned with long hair, she expects more out of life, but comes to realize she has to find out about life 'fuh theyselves' (for herself), just as people can only go-to-God for themselves. Set in central and southern Florida in the early 20th century, the novel was initially poorly received for its rejection of racial uplift literary prescriptions. Today, it has come to be regarded as a seminal work in both African-American literature and women's literature.TIME included the novel in its 2005 list of the 100 best English-language novels published since 1923.
With legislation like the Jim Crow laws, enacted from 1890 to 1910, many African-Americans were disfranchised. Groups like the Ku Klux Klan terrorized black citizens, leading to the steady decline of African-American political representation. Tenant farming and sharecropping systems constituted the de facto re-enslavement of African Americans in the South, where Hurston's novel is based.
Racism was gaining legitimacy in the decades leading up to Hurston's writing of Their Eyes Were Watching God. Baptist preacher Thomas Dixon, Jr. wrote The Leopard's Spots: A Romance of the White Man's Burden in 1902, asserting white supremacy amidst supposed African-American evil and corruption. The book was so popular that Dixon wrote a trilogy. His second novel, The Clansman', was adapted for the silent film Birth of a Nation, portraying African-American men in an unintelligent, sexually aggressive light (1915). Writers during the Harlem Renaissance, African-American writers were urged to write toward an Uplift program, to improve the image of African-Americans in society. For more information, see W. E. B. Du Bois and his article,"Criteria of Negro Art".
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