Their Eyes Were Watching God
Zora Neale Hurston, Edwidge Danticat, Mary Helen Washington, Henry Louis GatesFair & long-legged, independent & articulate, Janie Crawford sets out to be her own person -- no mean feat for a Black woman in the ‘30s. Zora Neale Hurston's classic 1937 novel follows Janie's quest for identity -- a journey during which she learns what love is, experiences life's joys & sorrows, & comes home to herself in peace. “There is no book more important to me than this one.” — Alice Walker
“Their Eyes belongs in the same category with [the works of] William Faulkner, F. Scott Fitzgerald, & Ernest Hemingway, that of enduring American literature.” — Saturday Review
Novels, including Their Eyes Were Watching God (1937), & nonfiction writings of American folklorist Zora Neale Hurston give detailed accounts of African American life in the South.
In 1925, Hurston, one of the leaders of the literary renaissance, happening in Harlem, produced the short-lived literary magazine Fire!! alongside Langston Hughes & Wallace Thurman shortly before she entered Barnard College. This literary movement developed into the Harlem renaissance.
Hurston applied her Barnard ethnographic training to document African American folklore in her critically acclaimed book Mules & Men alongside fiction Their Eyes Were Watching God . She also assembled a folk-based performance dance group that recreated her Southern tableau with one performance on Broadway.
People awarded a Guggenheim fellowship to Hurston to travel to Haiti & conduct research on conjure in 1937. Her significant work ably broke into the secret societies & exposed their use of drugs to create the Vodun trance, also a subject of study for fellow dancer-anthropologist Katherine Dun