Their Eyes Were Watching God is TERRIBLE!

[genoveva]

First of all, no, sorry I never read the book.

I have no pity for blacks. Anymore. See, I've tried to enroll in `Ebonics University' but they rejected my app. on the grounds I had no hope in hell at my age to pick up new language, and I'm too damn `white' to `get' it all.

This is a very interesting discussion. I have not heard about this book until this year, and the title has stuck in my mind, and only have I now research what it's about. I am shocked and feel quite offended about many of the comments in this thread that read strongly racist.

I know these are fairly old posts, so perhaps some attitudes have changed.

Just because Zora Neale Hurston was black doesn't mean that she wrote the book to generate pity for all blacks. She was also a woman! Why isn't there any discussion or criticism of this novel being a feminist text, then?

A one sentence summary of the book from Sparknotes 101 reads:

"After two marriages to oppressive men, a woman finds temporary happiness with a husband twelve years her junior."

This would imply a different interpretation of the novel than your typical southern, black novel.

Other interesting facts about the author and the novel: (Again, from SparkNotes 101- gotta love it!)

"Zora Neale Hurston was born on January 7th, 1891, in Notasulga, Alabama, to John Hurston, a carpenter and Baptist preacher, and Lucy Potts Hurston, a former schoolteacher. Hurston was the fifth of eight children. When she was a toddler, her family moved to Eatonville, Florida, the first all-black town in the United States, where John Hurston served several terms as mayor."

She earned an associate degree from Howard University.

Along with Langston Hughes and Wallace Thurman, she organized the journal Fire!- "considered one of the defining publications of the era".

She enrolled in Barnard College "and studied anthropology with Franz Boas, arguably the greatest anthropologist of the twenthieth century."

She published Their Eyes Were Watching God in 1937.

She won a Guggenheim Fellowship.

Her work fell into obscurity and by the 1940's she had a hard time getting published.

"By the early 1950's, she was forced to work as a maid."

"A stroke in the late 1950's forced Hurston to enter a welfare home in Florida. She died penniless on January 28, 1960, and was buried in an unmarked grave."

As mentioned previous in this thread, Alice Walker "rediscovered her work in the late 1960's. In 1973, Walker traveled to Florida to place a marker on Hurston's grave that read 'A Genius of the South."

Walker wrote a 1975 essay in the magazine Ms. titled "In Search of Zora Neale Hurston" which placed Hurston's work back into the "limelight".

The novel was written in 1937 in Haiti.

Food for thought...