Book Club: Their Eyes Were Watching God

​Zora Neale Hurston's Their Eyes Were Watching God is set in Eatonville, Florida, a rural town and the first self-governing Black municipality in the United States. Janie, the novel's protagonist, traverses the Everglades, West and Central Florida in search of her independence, her voice and herself. Join us as we explore themes including Southern Black cultural traditions, Floridian climate and weather as metaphor, and the role of land stewardship in nurturing community in one of Hurston's most celebrated works of fiction.

​Overview from the National Endowment of the Arts:

​To call Zora Neale Hurston's Their Eyes Were Watching God an "African American feminist classic" may be an accurate statement—it is certainly a frequent statement—but it is a misleadingly narrow and rather dull way to introduce a vibrant and achingly human novel. The syncopated beauty of Hurston's prose, her remarkable gift for comedy, the sheer visceral terror of the book's climax, all transcend any label that critics have tried to put on this remarkable work. First published amid controversy in 1937, then rescued from obscurity four decades later, the novel narrates Janie Crawford's ripening from a vibrant, but voiceless, teenage girl into a woman with her finger on the trigger of her own destiny. Although Hurston wrote the novel in only seven weeks, Their Eyes Were Watching God breathes and bleeds a whole life's worth of urgent experience.

​"The wind came back with triple fury, and put out the light for the last time…. They seemed to be staring at the dark, but their eyes were watching God." —from Their Eyes Were Watching God