Staff Pick
This book changed my life and the way I read fiction. The folk dialect narrative brought me further inside a main character’s mind than I’d ever gone before, until I found myself seeing through Janie’s eyes and experiencing her losses and heartache as my own. If identifying with a black woman’s voice and struggle is considered dangerous enough to merit book banning, the act of reading this richly significant novel is an act of societal rebellion. Recommended By Aubrey W., Powells.com
Synopses & Reviews
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 years—due largely to initial audiences’ rejection of its strong black female protagonist—Hurston’s classic has since its 1978 reissue become perhaps the most widely read and highly acclaimed novel in the canon of African-American literature.
Review
"There is no book more important to me than this one." Alice Walker
Review
"The prototypical Black novel of affirmation; it is the most successful, convincing, and exemplary novel of Blacklove that we have. Period." June Jordon, Black World
Review
"Their Eyes belongs in the same category with that of William Faulkner, F. Scott Fitzgerald, and Ernest Hemingway of enduring American literature." Saturday Review
Review
“A 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 don’t know how to live properly.” Zadie Smith
About the Author
Zora Neale Hurston (1891-1960) was a novelist, folklorist, and anthropologist whose fictional and factual accounts of black heritage remain unparalleled. Her many books include Dust Tracks on a Road; Their Eyes Were Watching God; Jonah's Gourd Vine; Moses, Man of the Mountain; Mules and Men; and Every Tongue Got to Confess.