![]() This ambition also led to tension in her romantic life. This lifelong passion to collect, record, and broadcast the everyday idiomatic communication of her people would inform four novels, two collections of folklore, an autobiography, and dozens of stories, articles, plays, and essays. ![]() His encouragement, combined with a stipend of $200 a month and a car from patron Charlotte Osgood Mason, allowed Hurston to complete much of her anthropological work in the American South. Franz Boas, often called the father of American anthropology. Later that year, as the only black scholar at Barnard College, Hurston studied with Dr. Heeding her mother's encouragement to "jump at de sun," she arrived in New York in January 1925 with $1.50 in her pocket. She completed her education at Morgan Academy in Baltimore and Howard University in Washington, DC, supporting herself with a variety of jobs from manicurist to maid. Her mother's death and father's remarriage led the outspoken Hurston to leave her hometown at 14 and become a wardrobe girl in an all-white traveling Gilbert and Sullivan troupe. Her parents were John Hurston, a carpenter and Baptist preacher who served several terms as mayor of Eatonville, and Lucy Potts Hurston, a schoolteacher before she raised eight children. Now lauded as the intellectual and spiritual foremother to a generation of black and women writers, Zora Neale Hurston's books were all out of print when she died in poverty and obscurity in 1960.īorn on January 7, 1891, in Notasulga, Alabama, Hurston and her family soon moved to Eatonville, Florida, the first all-black incorporated town in the United States. In Janie Mae Crawford, Hurston rejects 19th- and early 20th-century stereotypes for women and creates a protagonist who though silenced for most of her life ultimately finds her own voice. Hurston's conviction that black culture is valuable, unique, and worthy of preservation comes through in Their Eyes Were Watching God via its harmonious blend of folklore and black idiom. With him she thinks she can find genuine love for the first time, but fate intervenes, and Janie fears she may have to choose between his safety and her own.Īlthough the novel is not an autobiography, Hurston once reflected that it is, at heart, a love story, inspired by "the real love affair of life." She also fictionalized another important incident in her life in the novel: In 1929, Hurston survived a five-day hurricane in the Bahamas, getting herself and another family out of a house moments before it began to collapse. After enduring a mostly joyless 20-year marriage to him, Janie finally meets a young, uneducated wastrel named Tea Cake. Unable to endure her mule-like servitude and the desecration of her dreams, she spontaneously leaves Logan for Joe Starks, a handsome, ambitious man determined to put her on a pedestal once he becomes mayor of Eatonville. From this vantage point, Janie narrates her life story to her best friend, Pheoby Watson, satisfying the "oldest human longing-self-revelation."įorced to marry for money at 16, Janie at first believes that love automatically comes with marriage. Written in only seven weeks while on a Guggenheim Fellowship in Haiti, Zora Neale Hurston's novel chronicles the journey of Janie Mae Crawford from her grandmother's plantation shack to Logan Killicks' farm, to all-black Eatonville to the Everglades-until a tragedy brings her back to Eatonville. Their Eyes Were Watching God (1937) begins with our eyes fixed on a woman who returns from burying the dead. They seemed to be staring at the dark, but their eyes were watching God." -from Their Eyes Were Watching God ![]() "The wind came back with triple fury, and put out the light for the last time…. Although Hurston wrote the novel in only seven weeks, Their Eyes Were Watching God breathes and bleeds a whole life's worth of urgent experience. First published amid controversy in 1937, then rescued from obscurity four decades later, the novel narrates Janie Crawford's ripening from a vibrant, but voiceless, teenage girl into a woman with her finger on the trigger of her own destiny. The syncopated beauty of Hurston's prose, her remarkable gift for comedy, the sheer visceral terror of the book's climax, all transcend any label that critics have tried to put on this remarkable work. To call Zora Neale Hurston's Their Eyes Were Watching God an "African American feminist classic" may be an accurate statement-it is certainly a frequent statement-but it is a misleadingly narrow and rather dull way to introduce a vibrant and achingly human novel. This title will no longer be available for programming after the 2020-21 grant year. ![]()
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