Their Eyes Were Watching God is a 1937 novel and the best-known work by African American writer Zora Neale Hurston. The novel narrates main character Janie Crawford's "ripening from a vibrant, but voiceless, teenage girl into a woman with her finger on the trigger of her own destiny.” Set in central and southern Florida in the early 20th century, the novel was initially poorly received for its rejection of racial uplift literary prescriptions. Today, it has come to be regarded as a seminal work in both African American literature and women's literature. Time included the novel in its TIME 100 Best English-language Novels from 1923 to 2005.
Read more about Their Eyes Were Watching God: Politics of Their Eyes, Plot Synopsis, Inspirations and Influences For Their Eyes, Critical Analysis, Adaptations For Theater, Film and Radio
Famous quotes containing the words eyes and/or watching:
“Well, most men have bound their eyes with one or another handkerchief, and attached themselves to some of these communities of opinion. This conformity makes them not false in a few particulars, authors of a few lies, but false in all particulars. Their every truth is not quite true. Their two is not the real two, their four not the real four; so that every word they say chagrins us and we know not where to set them right.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)
“But wishes breed not, neither
Can we fend off rock arrival,
Lie watching yellow until the golden weather
Breaks, O my heart’s blood, like a heart and hill.”
—Dylan Thomas (1914–1953)