Their Eyes Were Watching God

Zora Neale Hurston's novel Their Eyes Were Watching God appeared in 1937 and takes place in Florida, in the central and southern parts of the state, in the early decades of the twentieth century. Janie Crawford returns to the town she had left a year before, and she is in her forties; the story of her life is told to her friend Phoeby, so the book reaches the reader as an account given to a listener rather than as narration from nowhere.

Janie's story begins with her grandmother, Nanny, who was enslaved, was raped by her owner and raised a daughter, Leafy, who was in turn raped by a schoolteacher and bore Janie before she began to drink and then abandoned the child. Nanny transfers her hopes from Leafy to Janie and arranges a marriage for her with Logan Killicks, a farmer older than Janie who wants a helper rather than a partner. Two more marriages follow: one to a man who becomes the mayor of a town and wants a wife he can display, and one to a younger man who takes her to the Everglades to work the bean fields alongside him.

Hurston wrote the novel in Haiti over seven weeks. Early responses from the African-American community were poor, and later generations of readers and writers reassessed its standing; in 2005 Time magazine placed it among the hundred best novels in English published since 1923.