![]() Indeed, from first to last this is a well nigh perfect story–a little sententious at the start, but the rest is simple and beautiful and shining with humor. It is about Negroes, and a good deal of it is written in dialect, but really it is about everyone, or least everyone who isn’t so civilized that he has lost the capacity for glory … The story of Janie’s life down on the muck of Florida Glades, bean picking, hunting and the men shooting dice in the evening and how the hurricane came up and drove the animals and the Indians and finally the black people and the white people before it, and how Tea Cake, in Janie’s eyes the ‘son of Evening Son,’ and incidentally the best crap shooter in the place, made Janie sing and glitter all over at last, is a little epic all by itself. “This is Zora Hurston’s third novel, again about her own people–and it is beautiful. –Richard Wright, The New Masses, October 5, 1937 She exploits that phase of Negro life which is ‘quaint,’ the phase which evokes a piteous smile on the lips of the ‘superior’ race.” In the main, her novel is not addressed to the Negro, but to a white audience whose chauvinistic tastes she knows how to satisfy. Her characters eat and laugh and cry and work and kill they swing like a pendulum eternally in that safe and narrow orbit in which America likes to see the Negro live: between laughter and tears … The sensory sweep of her novel carries no theme, no message, no thought. Her dialogue manages to catch the psychological movements of the Negro folk-mind in their pure simplicity, but that’s as far as it goes. Miss Hurston voluntarily continues in her novel the tradition which was forced upon the Negro in the theatre, that is, the minstrel technique that makes the ‘white folks’ laugh. “Miss Hurston seems to have no desire whatever to move in the direction of serious fiction … Miss Hurston can write, but her prose is cloaked in that facile sensuality that has dogged Negro expression since the days of Phillis Wheatley. ![]() –George Stevens, The Saturday Review of Literature, September 18, 1937 No one has ever reported the speech of Negroes with a more accurate ear for its raciness, its rich invention, and its music.” Otherwise the narration is exactly right, because most of it is in dialogue, and the dialogue gives us a constant sense of character in action. The title carries a suggestion of The Green Pastures, but it is to this extent misleading no religious element dominates this story of human relationships … The only weak spots in the novel are technical it begins awkwardly with a confusing and unnecessary preview of the end and the dramatic action, as in the story of the hurricane, is sometimes hurriedly and clumsily handled. The few white characters in the book appear momentarily and incidentally. The town of Eatonville is as real in these pages as Jacksonville is in the pages of Rand McNally and the lives of its people are rich, racy, and authentic. “Whether or not there was ever a town in Florida inhabited and governed entirely by Negroes, you will have no difficulty believing in the Negro community which Zora Neale Hurston has either reconstructed or imagined in this novel. Today, 83 years on from its publication, we take look back at some of the original reviews of Their Eyes Were Watching God. Walker’s 1975 essay, ‘ Looking for Zora,’ in which she chronicled her search for Hurston’s unmarked grave, was a particularly significant part of this effort. This, coupled with a growing black feminist movement, spearheaded by activist writers like Audre Lorde and Alice Walker, helped create a space in which Hurston’s work could be rediscovered. Du Bois’ Uplift agenda. A decades-long wilderness period in which both the novel and its author fell into obscurity ended with the establishment of several Black Studies programs in universities across America in the 1970s and 1980s. Now considered one of the greatest novels of the 20th century, Zora Neale Hurston’s Their Eyes Were Watching God had to travel a rocky road to immortality. Initial reviews ranged from positive to condescending to downright hostile, as many in the African American literary community bristled at Hurston’s rejection of the Harlem Renaissance and W.E.B. They seemed to be staring at the dark, but their eyes were watching God. They sat in company with the others in other shanties, their eyes straining against cruel walls and their souls asking if He meant to measure their puny might against His. Night was striding across nothingness with the whole round world in his hands. It is so easy to be hopeful in the daytime when you can see the things you wish on.
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