Their Eyes Were Watching God

Author - Zora Neale Hurston ... [Goo?] [Posters]

This Paperback Book item from Harper Perennial Modern Classics was reviewed on 10-Dec-2008.

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1) Paperback Book Their Eyes Were Watching God by Harper Perennial Modern Classics. The only speedbump in this maddeningly addictive read is Hurston´s rendering of dialect, spelled just as it´s pronounced. Once you acclimate, and once you know that her writing was based on her astounding academic work as a folklorist and anthropologist, it only takes a few pages before you realize that you´re in the hands of a master. The hundreds of people who have taken the time to review this book testify to its impact--once you´re done with it, it evokes a compulsion to share the experience.

The brilliance of the book is only enhanced by its brevity. You can easily read it in a sitting, although you´ll find yourself lingering on some of the pages as you turn over the expressiveness and beautiful language phrase by phrase. So many reviewers have summed up the story´s plot, I´ll leave that description to a single line: beautiful love story, crafted by genius.

"Their Eyes Were Watching God" is amazing when read as the resurrection of a woman´s spirit, and just as amazing when read as the resurrection of a tremendous writer from the South. The hard ending of the love story and the irony of its demise at the fangs of a mad dog are a tragic parallel to the end of Hurston´s own life, a literary genius educated at Barnard who died impoverished and old, working as a maid in Florida.

Alice Walker was so influenced by Hurston that she searched out her weedy grave and marked it with a headstone, from one great writer to another it says: Zora Neale Hurston, Genius of the South, Novelist Folklorist Anthropologist, 1891-1960.¤

2) Paperback Book Their Eyes Were Watching God by Harper Perennial Modern Classics. I´ve never read anything so beautiful. The characters were so rich and the story was just perfect. Janie, the main character, was everything a woman is supposed to be, beautiful, confident, strong and capable. I felt like I was there, I felt their pain and happiness. The way she described things not only made you feel as if you were there but it was written in this way that is so beautiful that even if she were describing a rotting carcas it would still sound like a delicate little flower. I would recomend this book to anyone. Even the coldest person could cry if they read this.¤

3) Paperback Book Their Eyes Were Watching God by Harper Perennial Modern Classics. This 1937 novel has become a classic of its time. It is a mere 184 pages long, but the edition of the book I read is packed by commentary. I skipped this commentary because I wasn´t particularly interested in literary or social analysis. I just wanted to experience the book for itself and the story it told. Reading it this way, I actually "felt" the book in the way the author intended. And, "wow", I really understand why it has stood the test of time.

Set in her native Florida, we first meet Janie Crawford, a black woman in her 40s, when she returns to the town of Eatonville. She´s been gone for a few years because she left town with a younger man named Tea Cake, who she married after she was widowed. As she tells her woman-friend her story, the reader is cast into her world.

Born the granddaughter of a slave, she was married young to a farmer who wanted more of a farm worker than a wife. She then ran away with a traveling salesman and moved to an all-black town where her new husband became the mayor. They had a general store and he expected her to run it, keeping her hair covered so that her beauty didn´t show, and expecting her to be the perfect wife in the eyes of his world. She was unhappy but accepted this and nursed him through a long illness. When he died, she ran the store herself where she met Tea Cake, who appreciated her good qualities and completely adored her. Against the wishes of the people in the town, she ran away with him.

All of the characters in this book come across as real people. All have flaws and all have strengths. For example, even though Tea Cake stole her money and lost it all gambling, he begged her forgiveness, managed to pay back the money and was a devoted husband. He got a job in the Florida Everglades where both he and she worked hard and loved hard and were part of a community. And then, they were swept up in a devastating hurricane. It was awful. Lots of people died. They had to swim for their lives amidst the horror around them. While trying to save her, Tea Cake is bitten by a dog. Only later do we discover the dog was rabid and that Tea Cake himself has rabies. He turns on Janie then and there are dire results.

The book moved fast. I was glued to it but it took some getting used to because it was written in the Southern Black dialect of the time. This actually made the characters even more real to me. She did not necessarily preach about segregation. To her it was a "given". However, I was particularly moved by the part where she described the aftermath of the hurricane and how the black men were rounded up to bury the bodies of the dead. They had to carefully separate the white bodies from the black bodies. The whites got coffins and were buried in one section. The blacks did not get coffins and were thrown into a pit. Often it was impossible for them to know the race of the decomposing bodies. To me, this said more about segregation in the South than anything else I´ve ever read on the subject.

This is a very worthwhile book. I loved it.¤

4) Paperback Book Their Eyes Were Watching God by Harper Perennial Modern Classics. In Their Eyes Were Watching God, middle-aged narrator Janie Crawford tells the story of her life to date. Janie was raised by her former-slave grandmother, who pushed Janie into a life of quiet conventionality as a farmer´s wife. Unsatisfied, however, when a man with big dreams comes along, Janie flees. Despite the promises she was given, Janie is again pushed into a life of quiet, albeit more comfortable, conventionality as the wife of a small town shopowner and mayor. When her second husband dies, Janie is left self-sufficient and free to choose the direction of her life. She decides to marry a drifter named Tea Cake for love. With Tea Cake she leaves the town that made her wealthy and heads to Florida. Here she lives a happy and almost pastoral life as a field worker until fate deals her a devastating blow.

Their Eyes Were Watching God is among the most influential African American novels of the 20th century. Though not uncontroversial, the novel deserves its plaudits. Zora Neale Hurston powerfully examines the self-realization of an increasingly free black woman, and the societal, both black and white, reaction to her and her choices. Both profoundly tragic and encouraging, the novel announces African-American literature´s independence and a new black vigor to 1930´s America - a time and literature whose importance to the civil rights movement has often been underrated. Some readers may find Hurston´s use of dialect off-putting or confusing.¤

5) Paperback Book Their Eyes Were Watching God by Harper Perennial Modern Classics. I still think fondly of this book, all the way back to high school. This is one of those incredible literary experiences that stays with you whether you loved it or hated it, and frankly I quite liked it.

The writing is deep, descriptive, and powerful, focused so much on the world around, nature.

The story, however, is deeply personal and rather feminist, that of a girl who is simply trying to be herself and find out who she is. This leads to various bad marriages until she finds her true love.

Throughout is thought-provoking words on nature, mankind, and the role of women in society.

It´s heartbreaking, but also powerful and poignant.¤

6) Paperback Book Their Eyes Were Watching God by Harper Perennial Modern Classics.

One of the most important works of twentieth-century American literature, Zora Neale Hurston´s beloved 1937 classic, Their Eyes Were Watching God, is an enduring Southern love story sparkling with wit, beauty, and heartfelt wisdom. Told in the captivating voice of a woman who refuses to live in sorrow, bitterness, fear, or foolish romantic dreams, it is the story of fair-skinned, fiercely independent Janie Crawford, and her evolving selfhood through three marriages and a life marked by poverty, trials, and purpose. A true literary wonder, Hurston´s masterwork remains as relevant and affecting today as when it was first published -- perhaps the most widely read and highly regarded novel in the entire canon of African American literature.

7) Paperback Book Their Eyes Were Watching God by Harper Perennial Modern Classics. 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.

Hurston´s use of dialect enraged other African American writers such as Wright, who accused her of pandering to white readers by giving them the black stereotypes they expected. Decades later, however, outrage has been replaced by admiration for her depictions of black life, and especially the lives of black women. 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¤

Page Updated: Robert N. Goolsby, 7-Jan-2009, 00608386719780060838676, 710-640-670-100-900-161-8

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