The next fortnightly book is Their Eyes Were Watching God, by Zora Neale Hurston. In college (first at Howard University then at Barnard College), Hurston became fascinated with anthropological and ethnographic research. She would spend her whole life researching folklore and folkways, and this would heavily inform her literary work, which is sometimes characterized as a kind of literary anthropology, attempting to capture a way of life on the basis of ethnographic research. Their Eyes Were Watching God was in part the result of over a decade of investigation into Southern folklore and was partly written while researching Obeah customs and rituals in Haiti which, given that a common theme in Hurston's anthropological work is underlying similarities among different ethnic cultural practices, is often seen as influencing what she decided to emphasize about Southern culture in writing the novel.
The novel, Hurston's second and published in 1937, did not do well. Her first novel had solidified her position as a promising light in the Harlem Renaissance sky; Their Eyes Were Watching God was widely, and harshly, criticized. The single most influential African American author of the day, Richard Wright, savaged it by saying that, while it showed she could write well, it also showed she had no interest in writing serious fiction, and he was far from being the only one to write a critical review of it. The broader press was varied but even at its best rarely more than mildly positive. Hurston would go on to write works that were somewhat better received, but she repeatedly refused to fall into line with what the dominant voices in her day were saying fiction and literature should be, and her outspoken lack of sympathy with political and social views of other intellectuals and authors led her to being something of an outsider in the Harlem Renaissance. Perpetually suffering from harsh reviews, her literary reputation began collapsing into obscurity toward the end of her life, and when she died in early 1960, she was barely getting by.
The obscurity surrounding her began to clear away in the 1970s. Alice Walker happened at one point to read something by her and became an enthusiastic fan of all her work, considering her one of the great literary geniuses of the twentieth century, and went on an extensive hunt to try to find out where she was buried. Walker eventually managed to find what was probably the unmarked grave (it was an unmarked grave in the right area) and commissioned a marker for it:
ZORA NEALE HURSTON
A GENIUS OF THE SOUTH
NOVELIST FOLKLORIST
ANTHROPOLOGIST
1901–1960
Walker also advocated for a return to reading Hurston, and under her influence, Hurston's reputation has slowly recovered. Interestingly, it is Their Eyes Were Watching God, originally the most harshly criticized of Hurston's most criticized works, that seems especially to have captured interest and hearts this time around, since it is easily her most popular work today.
The book is the tale of Janie Crawford, a woman in search of marriage with love. It is harder to find than it sounds, even for an extraordinarily attractive woman like herself. And finding it will involve her in more difficulty than she could imagine, and in particular, she will find herself a murder suspect because of it.
