Their Eyes Were Watching God

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Their Eyes Were Watching God

• By Zora Neale Hurston

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• Zora Neale Hurston (left) in her earliest known
  photograph.

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• At the height of the Harlem Renaissance during
  the 1930s, Zora Neale Hurston was the preeminent
  black woman writer in the United States.

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• Of Hurston's fiction, Their Eyes Were Watching
  God is arguably the best-known and perhaps the
  most controversial.

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• The novel follows the fortunes of Janie
• Crawford, a woman living in the black town of
  Eaton, Florida.

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• Hurston's use of dialect enraged other African
  American writers such as Richard Wright, who
  accused her of pandering to white readers by
  giving them the black stereotypes they expected.

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• Decades later, however, outrage has been replaced
  by admiration for her depictions of black life,
  and especially the lives of black women.

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In Their Eyes Were Watching God Zora Neale
Hurston breathes humanity into both her men and
women, and allows them to speak in their own
voices.--Alix Wilber
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• Zora Neale Hurston died on January 28, 1960.
  After friends from near and far raised over 600
  in her memory, Zoras funeral was held at the
  Peek Funeral Chapel on February 7, 1960. Zora was
  laid to rest in an unmarked grave in this (then
  segregated) cemetery.

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• In the early 1970s, Alice Walker, author of The
  Color Purple, located the grave which she
  determined to be Zoras, and so began Zoras
  second rise from near obscurity to fame.

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• We are a people. A people do not throw their
  geniuses away. If they do, it is our duty as
  witnesses for the future to collect them again
  for the sake of our children. If necessary, bone
  by bone.
• --Alice Walker, author, 1976.