Zora Neale Hurston, Their Eyes Were Watching God

Helen Carr (Goldsmiths College, University of London)

Ed. by Stuart Green, University of Leeds
The Literary Encyclopedia. Volume 3.2.5: African American Writing and Culture of the United States.
Vol. editors: Sofia Ahlberg (Uppsala University), Philathia Bolton (University of Akron), Patrick Chura (University of Akron), J. Michael Duvall (College of Charleston), Emory Elliott (University of California, Riverside), A Yemisi Jimoh (University of Massachusetts Amherst), Stephen E. Meats (Pittsburg State University), Tony Papanikolas (San Jose State University)

Dates

First circulation or publication 1937

Places

United States (Country of Origin)

Genres and Modes

Novel

Resources

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Zora Neale Hurston wrote her second and best-known novel,

Their Eyes Were Watching God

, during an ethnographic field-visit to Haiti, collecting Haitian folklore during the day, and late into the night recreating the world of Eatonville, Florida, the all-black township in which she had grown up. The novel drew on her memories of its inhabitants’ rich folk culture, for which she saw many parallels in Haiti, but her immediate impetus for writing came in fact from an intense, abortive love-affair. In her autobiography, Hurston says the novel “was damned up in me . . . I wrote it under internal pressure in seven weeks”; within it, she says, she sought to “embalm all the tenderness of my passion” for her lover (

Dust Tracks

pp. 717, 770). Yet though the novel includes an account of a…

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2095 words

Citation: Carr, Helen. "Their Eyes Were Watching God". The Literary Encyclopedia. First published 01 July 2011 [https://www.litencyc.com/php/sworks.php?rec=true&UID=8257, accessed 23 November 2024.]

Zora Neale Hurston, Their Eyes Were Watching God

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