At the height of the Harlem Renaissance during the 1930s, Zora Neale Hurston was the preeminent black woman writer in the United States. She was a sometime-collaborator with Langston Hughes and a fierce rival of Richard Wright. 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. Yet by the late 1950s, Hurston was living in obscurity, working as a maid in a Florida hotel. 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.

Of Hurston's fiction, Their Eyes Were Watching God is arguably the best-known and perhaps the most controversial. The novel follows the fortunes of Janie Crawford, a woman living in the black town of Eaton, Florida. 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. 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. It was the time to hear things and talk. These sitters had been tongueless, earless, eyeless conveniences all day long. Mules and other brutes had occupied their skins. But now, the sun and the bossman were gone, so the skins felt powerful and human. They became lords of sounds and lesser things. They passed nations through their mouths. They sat in judgment.

Their Eyes Were Watching God

Have you ever read a book that's exactly like real life? Well the book Their Eyes Were Watching God is just that. It's about a girl named Janie that gets married twice, and then runs off with a guy named Tea Cake that's younger than her. The book is based on the old days where the wife would always have food ready and on the table for the husband when he comes home, and how you would only date or marry people you age. Well, Janie didn't like that. Janie is the type of girl that has her own mind.
I really recommend this book to girls because it's got a little bit of a love story to it, but it would also be a good book for a guy too because it's just a good book for a guy. If it sounds good to you, read Their Eyes Were Watching God. You'll love it.

An outstanding story

Their Eyes Were Watching God was one of the best books that I've ever read. The book answered a lot of questions about life. We are faced with several conflicts in humanity with choices having to be made between Love, Good, Evil, Hope or reality, and Truth. It is a story about Janie, a young black woman, who tries to find herself through her grandmother's footsteps and eventually confronts herself to become the person she knows is of her own good. Taken along the memory lane in a small southern black town, "Their Eyes were Watching God" is a beautiful portrayal of the conflicts confronting Janie, not only about herself but also about how her society perceives her. Through an amazing creativity in characters, plot development, excellent narrative, lessons and dialogues and an easy ride through time, Zora successful made the reader to understand and appreciate black culture. It reminded me of DISCIPLES OF FORTUNE, THE GREAT GATSBY, UNCLE TOM'S CABIN.This absolutely credible story is a highly recommended book to anyone with a taste for classic stories.

transcends time and race.........

Zora Neale Hurston weaves a magical spell as she transports readers into the world of Janie Crawford. Through the use of provincial dialogue, the reader is coaxed into leaving behind the current time and gently submersing themselves into an earlier era.
Janie is a young, thought filled, intelligent woman who freely observes and ponders life as she experiences it. She weighs and appraises unfolding events and makes deliberate and difficult choices in order to live a life defined by the depth and passion she determines, with no holds barred.
While this novel has been defined as one of the finest Black novels of all time, I feel that it is more than that...it is one of the finest novels about a person throwing off the expectations and pressures of others and pursuing their own truths. This is a story that transcends time and delivers it's timeless message of living life on one's own terms and living it fully.