Introduction
When Their Eyes Were Watching God first appeared in 1937, it was well-received by white critics as an intimate portrait of southern blacks, but African […]
Their Eyes Were Watching God
Zora Neale Hurston
Zora Neale Hurston’s colorful life was a strange mixture of acclaim and censure, success and poverty, pride and shame. But her varied life, insatiable curiosity, […]
Plot Summary
A Chapter 1 Zora Neale Hurston’s Their Eyes Were Watching God opens with a lyrical passage in which Janie Starks returns to Eatonville, where she […]
Characters
A Janie Crawford The heroine of the novel, Janie, is the first black woman character in African American fiction to embark on a journey of […]
Themes
Zora Neale Hurston’s Their Eyes Were Watching God charts the development of an African American woman living in the 1920s and 1930s as she searches […]
Historical Perspective
A The Great Depression For southern farmers, both black and white, who did not enjoy the prosperity of northern industrial centers, the Great Depression had […]
Compare and Contrast
1920s and ’30s: The numbers of unemployed African Americans during the Great Depression was as much as 25 percent in northern cities, and well over […]