Zora Neale Hurston

1. Zora Neale Hurston "A Genius of the South" 1901---1960 Novelist, Folklorist, Anthropologist (from her tombstone)

2. Their Eyes Were Watching God Essential Questions : • Who was Zora Neale Hurston? • For whom is the book written? • What is the message of the book? • How is the message of the book conveyed? • How has the book been perceived?

3. Who was Zora Neale Hurston? nanny, maid, waitress, student, sorority girl, poet, wife, author, playwright, lecturer, folklorist, college graduate, biographer, teacher, actor, Guggenheim winner, federal researcher, movie consultant, divorcee, distinguished alumnus, traveller, maid, librarian, columnist, substitute teacher, pauper…ZORA! "Mama exhorted her children at every opportunity to 'jump at de sun.' We might not land on the sun, but at least we would get off the ground."

4. For whom was the book written? Audiences are many and multi-layered, but Hurston seems to have written the book for largely for herself. She was originally writing herself out of a hopeless love affair with a man who felt she should give up her career for marriage. Many other audiences are secondary: Who might those audiences be? “I tried to embalm all the tenderness of my passion for him in Their Eyes Were Watching God.” –Hurston, in Autobiography

5. What is the message of the book? This is a book about… “Ships at a distance have every man’s wish on board. For some they come in with the tide. For others they sail forever on the horizon, never out of sight, never landing…. Hurston in Their Eyes

6. How is the message of the book conveyed? "I have the nerve to walk my own way, however hard, in my search for reality, rather than climb upon the rattling wagon of wishful illusions."     - Letter from Zora Neale Hurston to Countee Cullen

7. How has the book been perceived? There is no book more important to me than this one. --Alice Walker 1967 “A well nigh perfect story — a little sententious at the start, but the rest is simple and beautiful and shining with humor." Lucille Tompkins of the New York Times Book Review 1937 "Miss Hurston voluntarily continues in her novel the tra dition which was forced upon the Negro in the theater, that is, the minstrel technique that makes the 'white folks' laugh." –Richard Wright in 1930s Hurston shows us that black men and women "attained personal identity not by transcending the culture but by embracing it." –Cheryl Wall, recent critic "For Hurston, the search for a telling form of language, indeed the search for a black literary language itself, defines the search for the self." –Henry Louis Gates, Jr. [The novel is one of] "resistance" [because it portrays] "the pressure of the dominant culture on the thoughts and actions of the all-black community of Eatonville as well as blacks as a whole.“- Gay Wilentz in Faith of a (Woman) Writer "I am not tragically colored. There is no great sorrow dammed up in my soul, nor lurking behind my eyes.“ –Z. N. Hurston

8. Why is this book of value to us?

9. Links: • i.am/zora • www.zoranealehurston.cc/ • www.zoranealehurston.ucf.edu/ • www.lkwdpl.org/wihohio/hurs-zor.htm • Wikipedia -- Zora Neale Hurston • falcon.jmu.edu/~ramseyil/hurston.htm • memory.loc.gov/ammem/znhhtml/znhhome.html • voices.cla.umn.edu/vg/Bios/entries/hurston_zora_neale.html • aalbc.com/authors/zoraneal.htm • www.hurston-wright.org/index.shtml “I have ceased to think in terms of race; I think only in terms of individuals….I am not interested in the race problem, but I am interested in the problems of individuals, white ones and black ones.”—Hurston to Nick Aaron Ford