Content s introduction Chapter I zora Neale Hurston’s life and career

2 Writer’s success works

An anthropologist and noted author, Zora Neale Hurston was a fixture of the Harlem Renaissance before writing her masterpiece, Their Eyes Were Watching God, a novel that was greeted with mixed reviews. A book with a complicated reception and publication history, Their Eyes Were Watching God was met with controversy early on. Alain Locke, who was an important voice of the Harlem Renaissance, wrote an early review of the book that suggested that Their Eyes Were Watching God was out of step with the more serious literary trends of the Harlem Renaissance. Richard Wright was even harsher in his criticism of the novel, blasting it in the magazine New Masses by proclaiming it contained “no theme, no message, no thought”. As Mark Spilka emphasizes, Wright dismisses Hurston’s novel without any acknowledgment of ”male abusiveness in black marriages”. Other reviewers, including Sterling Brown, similarly dismissed Their Eyes Were Watching God, seeing it as “worthless because it seemed to ignore the political and social realities of the time”. Many contemporary black reviewers also criticized the novel for being too sentimental, a feature of the novel that many contemporary white reviewers (paradoxically) seemed drawn to. By and large, their reviewers offered more praise for Hurston’s novel than did the black reviewer’s of that time period.

Though the novel was much discussed in the years following its initial publication, Hurston’s work slid into obscurity for decades, due to a number of cultural and political reasons. It was not until the 1970s when, thanks in large part to Alice Walker, Their Eyes Were Watching God again became popular reading – and a mainstay in high school and college literature courses. The mixed reactions to the novel that emerged at the time of its initial publication, coupled with the fact that the book nearly dropped off the radar only to be revived when, in 1975, Alice Walker published her now seminal article “In Search of Zora Neale Hurston” in the March 1975 issue of Ms. Magazine, adds to the sense that Their Eyes Were Watching God was, and remains, a provocative and potentially polarizing text.