Book Club Guide

Their Eyes Were Watching God

by Zora Neale Hurston · 1937 · Classics

Key themes

The search for a voice that belongs to oneself
Love as horizon — always receding until it is truly found
Blackness, womanhood and the double consciousness of the American South

About this book

Janie Crawford, a Black woman in early 20th-century Florida, tells the story of her three marriages and her search for love, self-determination and voice. Hurston's novel was rediscovered by Alice Walker in the 1970s and is now central to both the Black literary tradition and the feminist canon.

Published in 1937, Their Eyes Were Watching God was written in seven weeks while Hurston was in Haiti on a Guggenheim fellowship. It was largely forgotten until Alice Walker wrote an influential 1975 essay rehabilitating Hurston's reputation.

Discussion questions

Janie's grandmother advises her to marry for security rather than love. How does the novel evaluate this advice — is the grandmother wrong, or does she represent a wisdom born of suffering?
The novel's prose style — particularly the dialect and the lyricism of its nature descriptions — is central to its effect. What does Hurston achieve through this style that standard literary English could not?
Tea Cake is often described as the love Janie was always seeking. But he also hits her. How do you engage with this — does the novel expect you to forgive this or simply to see it as part of a complex person?
The novel was poorly received when published in 1937 and not reprinted for decades. What do you think explains its original neglect — and what does its revival say about whose literature gets preserved?
Hurston said she wrote a big old lie about nothing — fiction for the pure pleasure of story and voice. What do you think this self-description captures about the novel's pleasures?