their eyes are watching god by zora neale hurston

They became lords of sounds and lesser things. But now, the sun and the bossman were gone, so the skins felt powerful and human. Mules and other brutes had occupied their skins. These sitters had been tongueless, earless, eyeless conveniences all day long. Unlike Wright and Ralph Ellison, Hurston does not write explicitly about black people in the context of a white world-a fact that earned her scathing criticism from the social realists-but she doesn't ignore the impact of black-white relations either: It was the time for sitting on porches beside the road. Hurston sets up her characters and her locale in the first chapter, which, along with the last, acts as a framing device for the story of Janie's life. The novel follows the fortunes of Janie Crawford, a woman living in the black town of Eaton, Florida.

Of Hurston's fiction, Their Eyes Were Watching God is arguably the best-known and perhaps the most controversial. She died in 1960 in a Welfare home, was buried in an unmarked grave, and quickly faded from literary consciousness until 1975 when Alice Walker almost single-handedly revived interest in her work. Yet by the late 1950s, Hurston was living in obscurity, working as a maid in a Florida hotel. Her stories appeared in major magazines, she consulted on Hollywood screenplays, and she penned four novels, an autobiography, countless essays, and two books on black mythology. She was a sometime-collaborator with Langston Hughes and a fierce rival of Richard Wright.

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

Their eyes are watching god by zora neale hurston