Their Eyes Were Watching God (Virago modern classic)

Wonderful story about the south

I watched an old interview of her on YouTube and felt the need to revisit some of her work. I was not disappointed.

Every girl/ woman in the world needs to read this book, especially those who love a great love story. I enjoyed this read so much!

This book started off as a challenge for me but I'm glad that I read it.it was interesting and informative.everyone should read it.thanks.

It's in great condition.

I appreciate Hurston's writing. She is an author who is ahead of her time, especially when it comes to depicting women as capable of being independent thinkers. It takes the main character, Janie Crawford, a Black woman in the 1920s, three marriages to get in touch with herself and realize that she can have an identity separate from her male spouse. Her growth throughout the story is remarkable. Her grandmother, a former slave, arranges Janie's first marriage. The marriage was destined to fail, and Janie then marries Joe Starks, a successful Black man. Joe provided well for Janie, but mistreated her and stifled her voice. Her third husband, Tea Cake Woods, is someone she truly loves and enjoys.Black communities in Florida provide the setting for the story, during a time where there was little integration of Black and White people in mainstream society. Hurston doesn't focus on how Caucasians interact with Blacks, but rather how Blacks interface with each other, and she emphasizes the African American culture in the South. Many subtleties and assumptions are played out through dialog. Hurston tells us a great deal about the labor market, life choices, and the expectations in Black Floridian communities—mostly in West Florida, Eatonville, and the Everglades. The Lake Okeechobee Hurricane of 1928 plays a prominent role in the plot of this story.Some of the symbols in the story truly enhance the book and provide beautiful imagery. The mule, road, porch, muck (The Everglades), and the hurricane are all used literally and symbolically. The messages of the book are multilayered and make the story timeless. I particularly liked the metaphor of the pear used a few times in the novel.Oh to be a pear tree—any tree in bloom! With kissing bees singing of the beginning of the world! She was sixteen. She had glossy leaves and bursting buds and she wanted to struggle with life but it seemed to elude her. (p. 20).

Very disappointed. Read a lot about this book, that it was a great American literary achievement. I saw nothing great about it. I found it shallow and very similar to other books I have read only worse. The writer seemed very angry at God and expresses this feeling in her writing. I got a little sick of it after awhile. Her self pity was a bit much to take.

Libro para un proyecto de la escuela.

Set in the 30s in the height of the Jim Crow era when many black people were under suppression, this novel tells the story of how the main protagonist Janie overcomes obstacles and stereotypes to become the person she yearned to be - using love.In spite of her not knowing that she was black until she was 6 - she was shielded from this knowledge having been raised by a nanny who worked for white people - doesn't devastate her.Zora presents Janie as a strong woman who has been married three times - one marriage was forced upon her by her nanny who thought it was a good idea to marry her off to an older man, as it would provide stability for her, the other marriage she walked away from as the husband was too domineering and her final love - her true love, gave her everything she desired. She could become part of every conversation, have friends, wear her hair down, dress how she felt to dress. She was liberated ... all through love.The book is 80% dialogue which I loved and full of metaphorical language.Even though this book was written so many years ago, I can see some parallelism in today's society.A great read!

Like a marvellous cocktail, this magnificent novel shakes you inside out. You end up seeing and hearing things which are right in front of your nose as if for the first time.The tale is simple, it seems, about an Afro-American woman struggling through two stifling marriages until she discovers love and freedom through living with a man who wants her only for herself. Simple, did I hear you say! It ain't that, but something straighter than that - it's true.This justly but belatedly famous 1937 book was a landmark of the inter-war Harlem Renaissance. Zadie Smith, in her Introduction to the Virago 2020 edition, has it partly right, I think, when she points with great self-consciousness to the story's 'soulfullness'. But she is too stuck on the book's place in her own private pantheon. The Afterword, by Sherley Anne Williams, is closer, in its emphasis on Thurston's keen ear for language, her dazzling re-creation of the vibrant and evocative speech of so-called 'unlettered', black folk in the southern USA in the early years of the 20th century.Thurston's precise, fluent dialogue, full of wit and wisdom, rooted in metaphor and lived experience, reminds me of the burst into literary life of native Irish story-telling at around the same time (for example, Sean O'Casey, Flann O'Brien and Patrick Kavanagh). Both emerged from a people hitherto hidden from 'high' culture, except in stereotypes; and both drew on deep, rural wells of fecund and lyrical expressiveness.The central character in Their Eyes Were Watching God is Janie - strong in her integrity but vulnerable in her humbleness. She is a wonderfully human heroine: not a masterful superwoman, aping masculinity, nor a vengeful force of nature overcoming the racism and sexism of her time (and ours). Instead, she endures, she keeps herself to herself, she lets other folk - her grandmother, her first two husbands, the gossips everywhere - think they got her beat. Then she flits off, breaking all the social and materialist rules except being true to herself. Tea Cake, her shining, wild-ish, young man is a fire-cracker.This novel is a delight to read. The most engaging parts, for me, are where working (or shirking) black men, with an occasional woman, gather outside a store or Tea Cake's shack, to chat languidly, their words fizzing with subtle but unlaboured repartee, incidentally revealing a whole community of different characters and hang-ups. They are themselves, not foils to a white man's world.There is also marital oppression, tragedy, racist injustice, class prejudice and a mighty hurricane. These things are an integral part of Thurston's story, but what stays with the reader is the author's playful, lively dialogue and Janie's increasingly full-hearted openness to the life around her.Zora Neale Thurston - as Zadie Smith's mother told her - was a great writer. Not to be pigeon-holed as a black female writer. Her true subjects are universal.'Love is lak de sea. It's uh movin' thing, but still and all, it takes its shape from de shore it meets, and it's different with every shore.'We respond, like Phoeby, Janie's friend to whom she relates her tale: 'Ah done growed ten feet higher jus' listenin' tuh you, Janie.'

This book is one of the set texts for my English Literature degree. I would not have read it if it hadn't been but I would have missed something beautiful. I will admit I struggled with the language, much of it is in dialect (i hope nobody objects to that term) which meant I had to virtually read it out loud to understand it. I found this challenging but as I had to read it, I invested in the Audible copy as a way into the text.The reading by Ruby Dee was brilliant, it brought the book to life. The ending is so evocative, I cried. I really hope that one day I will generate that degree of feeling in someone.

This writing with literal Afro-American dialect is a blocker for reading; particularly for a non-native English, or an American.I have finished Alice Walker's The Color Purple which is written in a similar fashion, but not heavy like this.I truly enjoyed all the way to the end. But this one is impossible for me.Though story sounded very good, I wish I could have proceeded; but only upto page 50. It is impossible to follow the plot, setting with this writing style.Author has a history of her parents being through Slavery.And she is an anthropologist, with feminist views.All these must have resulted in the rough and literal language of Afro-American dialect, and the sad love life of awakening strong character Janie; reader feels it.

The most beautifully written novel I have read. At first it could be tricky to get into the flow of this book, however persevere as the story is well thought out and the writing is almost lyrical in places. This has become one of my favourite books and a real shame that not many people are aware of its greatness. Give it a go.