When J. B. Lippincott published Their Eyes Were Watching God on September 18, 1937, its 286 pages could be purchased for two dollars. This was Hurston's second novel and her third book to be published. Further, her reputation as the leading female literary light of the Harlem Renaissance demanded critical attention in major publications. At the time of its publication, however, it was seen as the next book in line from an author whose reputation was already established. Their Eyes Were Watching God was not any kind of a breakthrough moment, and Hurston did not pause to celebrate its publication. She just kept on writing and publishing—four more books before she would meet with resistance from her publishers. History would determine, though, that this would be the book to call attention to her once again. It is through Their Eyes Were Watching God that a new generation of readers has discovered Hurston. Today's readers are most likely to start with this novel and then, admiring it, turn to her other six books.

For each of her books at the time of their original publications, contemporary reviews were abundant and mostly positive. Except for Their Eyes Were Watching God, the rest of Hurston's work received two waves of criticism. Critics have paid attention to Their Eyes Were Watching God in three distinct blocks of time: upon its first being published in fall 1937; again in the 1970s when it was being discussed as one of the most unread masterpieces of American literature; and the full and mature exploration of its richness in the decade of the 1990s. The rest of her work had brief attention upon publication and then, hanging onto the coattail of Their Eyes Were Watching God, a more fully developed exploration beginning in the 1990s.

For Their Eyes Were Watching God, the first wave of reviews in Saturday Review of Literature, Time, New York Times Book Review, Nation, and New Republic all appeared within the first month after its publication. But it was Richard Wright's influential damning of the book in an October issue of New Masses that is perhaps the most frequently cited contemporary critical commentary on the novel. Reviews by whites in periodicals with a majority white audience cautioned and encouraged potential readers not to let prejudices stand in the way. Others seem fixated on the “Negro-ness” of the text and the dialect that should not keep a white reader from trying to read it; though the book was about a black world, it really spoke about everyone. One male reviewer found Joe Starks more interesting than Janie, but all the female reviewers found Janie and especially her egalitarian relationship with Tea Cake the best part of the novel. Hurston was both praised for her use of Negro dialect and attacked for it. The attacks came from male black reviewers who felt that Hurston was pandering to the primitive and the minstrel tradition. Some had problems with the title and Wright went so far as to claim the book was without ideas. Early on, one reviewer noted a connection with the Blues aesthetic. Her folk speech and her folklore fiction were pronounced as good as was available, but she was encouraged by these male reviewers not to hang back with the primitives but to move ahead and use her talents in the worthwhile service of social document fiction. In short, what many saw as the beauty and strength of her use of language was seen by others as its greatest weakness for the primitive view presented of the race.

For the next three decades—during the 1940s, 1950s, and 1960s—there were few readers of, and very little critical attention paid to, any of her books. Then Their Eyes Were Watching God was reissued by two separate presses during the 1960s, and yet another in 1970. During the 1970s, several events coincided that helped a new generation discover Hurston's novel and launched the second wave of critical attention. In the forefront of this activity were Robert Hemenway and Alice Walker. Hemenway's Zora Neale Hurston: A Literary Biography in 1977 and a re-issue of Their Eyes Were Watching God in 1978, both by the University of Illinois Press, and several important articles in Ms. magazine by the already well-known writer Alice Walker attracted widespread attention on college campuses, in literary circles, and among the country's many book clubs.

Prior to Hemenway's biography of Hurston, critics attempted to establish biographical connections between Hurston and her characters, which yielded a limited view of Their Eyes Were Watching God. Others began the work of placing Hurston within a literary context and wondered if she had created a new paradigm. One critic connected the search for identity with a search for Blackness, while another found the work a novel of black affirmation. Another saw that the protest novel was being redefined, suggesting that here was a feminine and individual protest. Yet another saw the novel as a triumph only insomuch as it was separated from the white world, which apparently stood ready to destroy these black characters. Hemenway was the first to point out the organic metaphors in the book, making special reference to the pear blossom. One book-length study on the curriculum of women's studies courses noted the growing presence of Their Eyes Were Watching God. Finally, Hurston was associated with a black-woman identified “black woman movement,” a tradition that was separate from and independent of other subsets of American literary traditions. At this time, it was expected that black female critics would write the best critical commentary on Hurston.

Another way to look at the critical attention that Hurston received through these three waves is to note that what began as comparatively short contemporary reviews of her novel in the first wave became assorted chapters within books or articles in mostly black journals in the second wave to book length studies of her work in the third wave. Their Eyes Were Watching God is closing in on seventy years of age. Its presence on university women's studies and assorted literature class syllabi is ubiquitous. Within the decade of the 1990s, the novel found its way into high school English classes as well. Most critics would agree that the seminal work of Henry Louis Gates Jr. about Hurston in The Signifying Monkey ushered in this third wave. Anthropology departments began paying attention to Mules and Men and Tell My Horse. Teachers fond of Their Eyes began teaching Jonah's Gourd Vine and Seraph on the Suwanee. Moses, Man of the Mountain became an addition to the syllabi of religious studies classes as well as English classes.

Critics have looked at Hurston's work through economic, psychological, biographical, and folk lenses, and most often a feminist perspective until midway through the 1990s, when new consideration suggested the work was not the feminist-womanist manifesto that had been so long in vogue. Critics also looked at humor, the journey to spiritual wholeness, and the need to assert oneself through talking. Close readings on all her works by one critic determined that Their Eyes Were Watching God is a novel of both traditional romance and a search for autonomy. Hurston's strong connection to Florida—its geography, its people, and its distinct differences—is beginning to be explored in the rest of her corpus. Once Hurston's collected letters are available in fall 2002, a whole new wave of criticism is likely to occur.

EARLY WAVE: CONTEMPORARY PERIODICAL REVIEWS, FALL 1937 AND EARLY WINTER 1938

Before Their Eyes Were Watching God appeared, its arrival was announced in Booklist [34 (1 Sept. 1937): 71], a periodical of the American Library Association with a target audience of librarians across the country. Clearly, the readership of this periodical was assumed to be white, and, indicative of the times, if a book contained a “beautiful” female character, she was also assumed to be white. Someone of a different race was always specified. In Booklist, Janie is described as a “handsome, partly white Negro girl,” the location is a “Negro village,” and hesitant white readers are told that the “Negro speech is easy to read.” Within the paragraph, the unidentified writer names one of the locations as the Everglades. At this time, throughout the segregated South, public libraries—even those with “Open to All” etched deeply in their granite walls above the front doors—were open to “Whites Only.”

Herschel Brickell's New York Post [14 September 1937] review calls the novel a “woman's story … of a complete and happy woman,” with a “refreshingly pagan undercurrent of the joy of life and an earthy wholesomeness that is both racial and universal.” Brickell applauds Hurston's ability to draw her characters “with an affection that completely transcends all self ûconsciousness.” Clearly, Brickell wants people to read this book and asks his dominantly white audience not to dismiss the book because it is about Negroes; he encourages readers to “not let their prejudices cheat them of the pleasure of reading a book so stirring as this.” Brickell identifies the person to whom Hurston dedicates the book, Henry Allen Moe, as having connections with the Guggenheim Foundation. Both Moe and the Foundation should be proud.

George Stevens, writing for the Saturday Review of Literature [16 (18 September 1937): 3] on the first day of the book's availability for the public, begins by throwing doubt on Eatonville itself: “Whether or not there was ever a town in Florida inhabited and governed entirely by Negroes.” Stevens assures the reader of his review that Eatonville's reality is of less importance since Hurston has either “reconstructed or imagined” the town with complete credibility. Clearly, Stevens's curiosity took him to an atlas because he continues with “Eatonville is as real in these pages as Jacksonville is in the pages of Rand McNally.” In truth, Stevens would have had to wait almost sixty years before Rand McNally would indicate in print that “Eatonville” existed in the state of Florida. (The town is prominently noted in the 2000 Rand McNally atlas.) Its eventual appearance is related directly to the literary rise of Hurston, who years after her death would become its most famous citizen.

Stevens calls Hurston's title “misleading,” as “no religious element dominates this story of human relationships.” Joe Starks is his favorite character, calling to mind Sinclair Lewis's Babbitt (1922) and Eugene O'Neill's Emperor Jones (1920). Starks is “rewarding” to the reader, but a “disappointment to Janie.” While Stevens obviously finds Janie less interesting than the men who court and marry her, he does sing praises for Hurston's ability to use language and especially dialect: “No one has ever recounted the speech of Negroes with a more accurate ear for its raciness, its rich intention, and its music.”

Two days later a critic for Time [30 (20 September 1937): 71], in a short review coupled with Waters Edward Turpin's These Low Grounds, fabricates a word that serves as article title, “Negropings.” From the tone of the piece, the word appears to suggest the idle gropings of Negro writers or the pings of Negro writers—neither interpretation is flattering to either writer being reviewed. The unidentified pen behind this review posits that Southerners would “simply disregard the equalitarian gropings implicit” in these novels and that Northerners would most likely find “some indigestible food for thought.” Both writers are identified as “Negro Authors,” and white readers are informed that they may well be opposed to “their violent brushwork,” but the seemingly deeply knowledgeable reviewer's retort to the assumed white response is that “Negro life is violent.” Only a short paragraph of one sentence comments on Hurston's novel itself appears in the review, and each of its points is wrongheaded. One point suggests that Janie outlives Tea Cake “because she was quicker on the trigger than he was,” which implies through omission a vindictive Janie; the other point claims that Janie has returned “to make her friends' eyes bug out” at her experiences, which suggests that Janie's motivations while away from Eatonville were aimed singularly at being able to take Joe's place among the porch dwellers. This review in Time unquestionably is the work of a white writer for a white audience. More than any other point, it calls attention to the fact that these books are the works of “Negro Authors”; what to do with Negro-ness appears to be the absorbing enigma. Ironically, the review sits at the top of a page directly beside a two-column ad, which boldly states, “All men are created equal” (“but unit heaters are not”).

Reviewing the book for the New York Times Book Review [(26 September 1937): 29], Lucy Tompkins comes closer to writing a summary report than a review, but she is the first to indicate Hurston's earlier works, though mistakenly referring to this second novel as Hurston's “third.” Tompkins also makes a comparison between Joe (Jody) Starks and O'Neill's Emperor Jones: “But Jody, like the Emperor Jones, changed everything, and unlike the Emperor, nothing ever changed him.” Much of the review quotes from Hurston's novel so that Tompkins can illustrate what she considers beautiful prose. She frames her review with clear indications that she is writing for a white audience. Early on she states: “It is about Negroes, and a good deal of it is written in dialect, but really it is about every one.” She concludes by reasserting her affection for the book, praising it as a “well-nigh perfect story,” but reminding her readers: “In case there are readers who have a chronic laziness about dialect, it should be added that the dialect here is very easy to follow, and the images it carries are irresistible.” Tompkins repeats what Booklist cautions about dialect. As long as the Negro speech is “easy,” then white readers need not fear it.

Appearing on the same day as Tompkins's review was Sheila Hibben's commentary in New York Herald Tribune Books [(26 September 1937): 2]. Hibben is the first reviewer to overtly state as a positive what powerful black male writers were moving towards embracing as a negative. At this time, Negro writers were expected to put forth their talents as advocates of and for the protest novel. Hibben congratulates Hurston for using both her head and her heart in this novel. To readers already familiar with Jonah's Gourd Vine and Mules and Men, Hibben suggests that the “vibrant Negro lingo” is found here as well. However, in this novel the “roots touch deeper levels of human life,” and “the story is filled with the ache of her own people” because “she is not too preoccupied with the current fetish of the primitive.” Hibben is also the first to see that in the relationship Janie has with Tea Cake, Hurston has succeeded in depicting “rapture and fun and tenderness and understanding—the perfect relationship of man and woman, whether they be black or white.” The equality in the relationship of Janie and Tea Cake, which will become a staple of the next wave of criticism, begins in this single comment. Though Hibben joins her contemporaries in not understanding the title, calling it “inept,” she vindicates Hurston by praising her depiction of “a swarming, passionate life, and in spite of Tea Cake's tragic end … there is a sense of triumph and glory.”

Richard Wright's condemnation of the novel occurs in several well-turned, yet thin paragraphs in a short review of both Hurston's and Turpin's novels, the same coupling as in the Time review. Wright slams both novelists for lacking “a basic idea or theme that lends itself to significant interpretation” in his review in New Masses [(5 October 1937): 22, 25]. The intensity of his harangue against Hurston, though, is fierce. In the one plot-summing-up paragraph, Wright's reading assigns the meanderings of Joe Starks, “from in and through Georgia,” as Tea Cake's origins, and for some mysterious reason, Wright quotes the phrase and corrects Hurston's spelling—“Georgy”—even within the quotation marks. He suggests that Hurston should somehow know better and is surprised that she “voluntarily [Wright's emphasis] continues in her novel the tradition which was forced upon the Negro in the theater,” making a reference to the minstrel techniques that Wright claims make white readers laugh. He chides Hurston for keeping her world so narrow, and then demolishes and trivializes her talent by summing up and dispensing with the novel that “carries no theme, no message, no thought.” His concluding rebuke suggests that he thinks Hurston should have known better than to play to the expectations of a white audience that finds joy in seeing Negro life as “quaint,” enabling the “superior” race to evoke a “piteous smile.”

In contrast to the praise that the earliest reviewers granted Hurston for her ability to use language beautifully, Otis Ferguson, in the New Republic [92 (13 October 1937): 276], enigmatically suggests she is both “wordily pretty, even dull,” that her “dialect is sloppy,” and concludes that her “superwordy, flabby lyric discipline we are so sick of leaves a good story where it never should have been potentially: in the gray category of neuter gender, declension indefinite.” Ferguson slams the book with faint praise through an opening litotes: “It isn't that this novel is bad, but that it deserves to be better.” He haltingly makes his way through the plot of the story and gives his most positive comments inside parentheses: “(the book is absolutely free of Uncle Toms, absolutely unlimbered of the clumsy formality, defiance and apology of a Minority Cause).”

Sterling Brown reviews the novel for Nation [145 (16 October 1937): 409-10] by identifying Hurston's “forte” as the “recording and the creation of folk-speech.” Brown is the first critic to make connections with the Blues aesthetics. Unlike Wright, he sees “bitterness,” sometimes “oblique” and sometimes “forthright” in Hurston's comments on the white race, particularly in the days of the cleaning up and in the burying of the dead in the aftermath of the hurricane. He does, however, refer to Joe Starks as Jody “Sparks,” which removes from Hurston's character the symbolic suggestions of the name of the man who provided Janie a “stark” existence by keeping her outside of the rich laughter of the porch dwellers.

Three reviews in January 1938 conclude this early wave of response to Hurston's second novel. In the Journal of Negro History [23 (January 1938): 106-7], Ethel Forrest finds the novel “a gripping story” and the writing style “natural and easy,” but the reviewer seems to have little awareness of the author. Forrest suggests that “in order to acquaint herself with the customs and habits of the people portrayed,” Hurston “lived among the Negroes of Florida and southern Georgia.” She sees the book as the result of intentional study of the people who would become fictional characters, such that Hurston in the name of her art gave herself over to them: she “understood the working of their minds, learned to speak their language.” Forrest is taken with the love story of Janie and Tea Cake, and lets the evocative power of that story suggest a comprehensiveness of Hurston's omnipotent understanding of the South: “Every phase of the life of the Negro in the south, like self-segregation of the Negroes themselves and the race hatred displayed by the southern white man has been interwoven in this book.”

W. A. Hunton, in the Journal of Negro Education [7 (January 1938): 71-2], compares the light-heartedness of Tea Cake with “Sportin' Life” in George and Ira Gershwin's opera Porgy and Bess (1935). Hunton points out the “healthy scorn” that he believes Hurston has “for the Negro's endeavor to pattern his life according to white bourgeois standards.” While he praises her ability to “translate folk speech into written prose,” he takes her to task on her narrative method, suggesting that characters do best when they speak for themselves, but when she interprets them, they become “two-dimensional.” In other words, complications between the races are smoothed out; the two examples he gives include the trial scene and the apparent easy ability of Joe Starks to buy land in Eatonville from the white man. Hunton argues that “it is too late in the day for such myopia,” and that if she wants to make the best use of her talent, “she must likewise change her point of view—and her audience.”

To conclude this first wave, one of the most puzzling commentaries was written by Alain Locke in Opportunity [16 (January 1938): 10]. Twelve years earlier in 1925, Opportunity had published Hurston's first short story, and Locke had been a supporter since the beginning of her writing career. What is mysterious is why this journal waited four months to review the book and why it was included in an overview of ten works of fiction of the Negro in 1937, instead of receiving full treatment in its own review. Locke gives the novel one substantive paragraph, claiming the book should not be re-told, but rather the book should be read. He praises the book as “folklore fiction at its best,” but asks the question, politely, that is no longer a new one: “When will the Negro novelist of maturity who knows how to tell a story convincingly,—which is Miss Hurston's cradle-gift, come to grips with motive fiction and social document fiction?” Locke has had enough of “entertaining pseudo-primitives.” He clearly sees Hurston's audience as the white reader, and he thinks that these laughing/joking characters suggest that all is right with the world—the way it is—in the 1937 American South.

SECOND WAVE: FROM THE 1970S THROUGH THE MID-1980S

Before Hemenway's biography and after Hurston's death in 1960, the best available source of biographical information about Hurston was her 1942 autobiography, Dust Tracks on a Road, a source seen by various critics from the beginning as unreliable. Depending on that autobiography, however, Darwin Turner's chapter, “Zora Neale Hurston: The Wandering Minstrel,” in his book, In a Minor Chord: Three Afro-American Writers and Their Search for Identity [Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1970], suggests that the image of Hurston that takes shape is “an imaginative, somewhat shallow, quick-tempered woman, desperate for recognition and reassurance to assuage her feelings of inferiority.” In reference to this image, “one must examine her novels, her folklore, and her view of the Southern scene” (98). Turner sees her writing through a psychological lens, which limits and colors her characters to reflect Hurston's life and experiences, and about Their Eyes Were Watching God specifically, he picks on her “tendency to report dramatic incident rather than to involve the reader with the emotions of the characters” (106). He suggests that she was incapable of giving up caricature, and connected Hurston herself with Mrs. Turner's skin-color prejudices (106-7). Further, she did not fare well in integrating folk material into her story; Turner implies that Hurston's tales extend through digression the action of the story. Finally, he sees her “emphasis upon intraracial and intrafamilial hatred” (108) as the most obvious fiction writer before Richard Wright to describe violence with black families.

Addison Gayle Jr.'s The Way of the New World: The Black Novel in America [Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1975] places Hurston and her writing in a chapter about “The Outsider.” Gayle sees Hurston as creating in Janie an example of a black woman rebelling against the definition of the expected role of black women, especially in the South. In a progression, Gayle submits that Janie with Logan Killicks is rejecting the traditional role of black woman; with Joe Starks, Janie is rejecting the role of white woman in the manner in which she was treated. Janie and Tea Cake together act against accepted standards. With Tea Cake, Janie “moved to validate her own womanhood in new terms. Neither sexual object, nor shallow imitation woman of the big house, she emerged from the novel as modern black woman” (146-7). Gayle's position is a historical one, as he tries to make sense of Hurston's place within the Harlem Renaissance and alongside of Fisher, Toomer, Hughes, and McKay, who all “went to the proletariat to seek values” (147). Most importantly, Gayle sees Janie as “not the completion of the new paradigm, but only evidence of an important beginning” (147).

Along with Gayle, Hemenway offers Mary Helen Washington [“Black Woman's Search for Identity,” Black World 21 (August 1972): 68-75] as the other best critic of Their Eyes Were Watching God. Washington is the first critic to overtly connect Janie's search for identity with her search for Blackness: “The descent into the Everglades is the last in a series of steps by which Janie discovers and comes to terms with her Blackness.” Both Nanny and Joe Starks wanted for Janie a kind of separateness, a sitting up on high, a superior position to and treatment from those around her. Janie ultimately defines herself by her own good judgment. Washington also points out how Hurston escapes “one of the plagues of Black literature—the handicap of having its most passionate feelings directed at ‘The Man.’” As with every black female critic in the first two waves, Washington joins them unequivocally in singing the high praises of Hurston's depiction of the egalitarian love between Janie and Tea Cake.

Two years later and fourteen years after Hurston's death, Black World featured Hurston on the cover of their August 1974 issue. June Jordan, in “On Richard Wright and Zora Neale Hurston: Notes Toward a Balancing of Love and Hatred” [Black World 23 (August 1974): 4-8], warns that “we almost lost Zora to the choose-between games played with Black Art.” She expresses dismay that Hurston, until recently, was not read, not known, and that this was “an appalling matter of record.” Richard Wright stood alone as the solitary great black writer because his Native Son was the novel of black protest, while Hurston suffered neglect because hers was a novel of black affirmation. Jordan argues that both are necessary; the either/or, like choosing King or Malcolm X, is “both tragic and ridiculous.” Jordan praises Their Eyes Were Watching God as a novel of “contagious, full Blacklove that makes you want to go and seek and find, likewise, soon as you finish the book.”

In this same issue, Ellease Southerland [Black World 23 (August 1974): 20-9] reviews each of Hurston's works. She identifies Their Eyes Were Watching God as being “widely read in universities, in Black Studies classes,” calling its “positive vibrations” a welcome departure from the “grim, death-ridden themes that weigh so many novels.” Southerland calls it the “first novel of a Black woman in search of joy, love, happiness,” but she also focuses attention on Hurston's oft-repeated references to the low opinion men hold of women's minds.

In Black Writers of the Thirties [Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1973], James O. Young undercuts the critical definition of “protest novel” as Richard Wright used it by redefining the term and applying it to Hurston. She too, he claims, wrote protest novels—not about race or class, but about feminine and individual protest. Because of the mutual love in Janie and Tea Cake's relationship, their life represented “an act of rebellion against outer-imposed definitions—against things as they are supposed to be.” Wright protested things as they were; Hurston protested things as they were supposed to be. Young claims that Hurston is “less concerned than any other black writer during the period with the conventional problems of the Negro.” In spite of the fact that he finds much of significance in the novel, he still says it “suffers from a lack of plot and faulty structure.” As Young sees the writers of the thirties, however, they are by and large a male lot. Only Alice Dunbar-Nelson, Jessie Fauset, Nella Larsen, and Margaret Walker, along with Hurston, receive even the briefest of mention.

Roger Rosenblatt, in his book Black Fiction [Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1974], writes of Hurston's novel in a chapter called “Eccentricities.” He sees Janie's progress as moving towards personal freedom, beginning “as a minor character in her own life story.” Rosenblatt points out the ongoing opposition to Janie's humanity and claims that Janie can only flourish with Tea Cake when they avoid the white world entirely. There is a world waiting, outside their “fantasy of independence,” to destroy them completely.

And so it went in the early 1970s. Meanwhile, Robert Hemenway was at work on Zora Neale Hurston: A Literary Biography [Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1977], which took him eight years to research and write. The biography, still in print after almost a quarter of a century, has not been superceded by another in-depth study. Though others have added to the ongoing scholarship of the chronology and life of Hurston, Hemenway is still the most reliable and comprehensive biographical source. He places the writing of Their Eyes Were Watching God in Haiti, in the course of seven straight weeks. As to be expected, Hemenway begins with a biographical account of the novel; for example, attributing Tea Cake's model as Hurston's twenty-three year old lover; Joe Starks's model as Eatonville's Joe Clarke. From Hurston's affair, Hemenway believes she took from that relationship the “quality of its emotion,” more specifically “its tenderness, its intensity, and perhaps its sense of ultimate impossibility” (231). However, Hemenway pushes on, calling the novel a culmination of a “fifteen-year effort to celebrate her birthright” and that in the act of writing this novel she was able to “reconcile public career and private emotion” (232). Up to this point in critical commentary, Hemenway points out that nobody had spent much time looking at the organic metaphors used to portray Janie's emotional life. He sees the blossoming pear tree that permeates the novel and suggests that its uses provide a “resolution of time and space, man and nature, subject and object, life and death” (234). When characters are not a part of the organic process of birth, growth, and death, they are left out of the rhythm of the universe and the essence of the novel's action.

Before Hemenway finished his opus, Alice Walker published “In Search of Zora Neale Hurston” in Ms. (March 1975), telling the narrative of finding Hurston's grave and the decision to honor her memory with a gravestone. Walker's last several paragraphs of this essay are among the most memorable lines that Walker has ever written, and in themselves attracted attention to, and readers for, the little-known woman upon whom Walker directs her eloquence: “There are times—and finding Zora Hurston's grave was one of them—when normal responses of grief, horror, and so on do not make sense because they bear no real relation to the depth of the emotion one feels.” Hemenway asked Walker to write the foreword to his biography. Her response was “Zora Neale Hurston—A Cautionary Tale and a Partisan View.” Once again, while not a critical commentary on the novel, a single line from this foreword has come to have powerful positive effects for bringing new readers to Their Eyes Were Watching God. This novel would be one of ten Walker would take to the proverbial desert island because she claims: “I would want to enjoy myself while identifying with the black heroine, Janie Crawford, as she acted out many roles in a variety of settings, and functioned (with spectacular results!) in romantic and sensual love. There is no book more important to me than this one” (xiii). Walker's enormously popular The Color Purple, published in 1982 and winner of a Pulitzer Prize and National Book Award, casts a spotlight on her and her opinions, which significantly helped attract a new generation of readers to Hurston's novel, which by 1978 was finally available in local bookstores everywhere. Walker and Hemenway deserve the credit not only for garnering a new reading audience for Hurston, but also for ushering in the beginning of more serious and thoughtful critical responses.

A final anthology to mention in this second wave, one that contributed to preparing the way for the third wave, is Gloria Hull, Patricia Bell Scott, and Barbara Smith's All the Women Are White, All the Blacks Are Men, But Some of Us Are Brave: Black Women's Studies [Old Westbury, NY: The Feminist Press, 1982]. Serving as a broad canvas for the early roots of black feminism—including black woman's place in women's studies courses, collection of sample syllabi of courses on black women writers, and assorted essays on the critical reception of black women writers—this compendium offers frequent references to Hurston and Their Eyes Were Watching God. Important within this study is Lorraine Bethel's “‘This Infinity of Conscious Pain’: Zora Neale Hurston and the Black Female Literary Tradition.” Claiming an “intellectual lynching” by white and black men and white women, Bethel's argument is that Hurston belongs in “a separable and identifiable tradition of Black women writers simultaneously existing within and independent of the American, Afro-American and American female literary traditions” (178). She is not just black-identified, but “Black-woman identified Black woman” (179), seeing and writing about her characters' experiences through the lens of both a woman and a black in a “society where these areas of experience are generally regarded as valueless, insignificant, and inferior” (179).

THIRD WAVE: THE LATE-1980S TO THE PRESENT

The Signifying Monkey: A Theory of Afro-American Literary Criticism [New York: Oxford University Press, 1988] by Henry Louis Gates Jr. ushers in a period of more lengthy, considered responses to Hurston's work. Gates's important chapter “Zora Neale Hurston and the Speakerly Text” acknowledges Hurston's Their Eyes Were Watching God as the “first example in [the black] tradition of ‘the speakerly text,’ by which [he] mean[s] a text whose rhetorical strategy is designed to represent an oral literary tradition” (181). In order to explore Hurston more thoughtfully, Gates brings into his discussion Wright's Native Son, Toomer's Cane, and Ellison's Invisible Man. Hurston's “legacy to Afro-American fiction is a lyrical and disembodied yet individual voice” that depicts a search for a black literary language, which “defines the search for the self” (183). Gates credits Hurston with introducing free indirect discourse into Afro-American narration, a term which suggests a merging of narrative commentary and direct discourse. For example, when Janie uses the metaphor of trees, with its dozens of repetitions, she “reveals precisely the point at which [her] voice assumes control over the text's narration” (186).

In Specifying: Black Women Writing the American Experience [Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1987], Susan Willis argues that black women's writing is connected to history and that a character's individual personality develops “in relation to the historical forces that have shaped the migrations of her race, the struggles of her community, and the relationships that have developed within her family” (3). When Willis states that “the black woman's relationship to history is first of all a relationship to mother and grandmother” (5), she pegs Hurston's novel easily, for Janie learns of her identity and her heritage from her grandmother. Willis sees the novel as moving through “three historically produced economic modes” (46). Janie's first marriage to Logan represents the brutality of the sharecropping system, which stifled dreams, killed the spirit, and denied art, imagination, and creativity. Her second marriage represents “the nascient black bourgeoisie, hell-bent for progress and ready to beat white society at its own game” (47). Finally, in a departure from black Northern migration, Janie and Tea Cake, in their atypicality, go to the muck, which represents a “mythic space.” Willis's economic thesis breaks down before Hurston's more important agenda of depicting a “truly reciprocal relationship” (48).

In Alice Kessler-Harris and William McBrien's edited collection called Faith of a (Woman) Writer, Gay Wilentz contributes “Defeating the False God: Janie's Self-Determination in Zora Neale Hurston's Their Eyes Were Watching God [New York: Greenwood Press, 1988, pp. 285-91]. Wilentz argues that the enigmatic title of the book implies a dual God—one “to whom we look for answers and pray for help and … the other god, the cruel, false god who definitely needs watching” (286). Janie's experiences have helped her see that folks need to stop watching “god” and “find out what their own lives are about before they go to God” (290). Wilentz associates the god that needs watching with the white hegemony; for Hurston, what is worth paying attention to is the richness of Janie's fight for self-determination, the joy of experiencing herself in a world distinct from a white world.

The first edited collection of essays on Hurston's work, New Essays on “Their Eyes Were Watching God” [New York: Cambridge University Press, 1990], was the work of Michael Awkward. In his introductory essay, he gives an overview of Hurston's critical reception from the publication of Their Eyes Were Watching God to the rediscovery of the novel forty years later. He suggests that the earlier political climate, which did not favor Hurston's agenda, in time became a more favorable rediscovery and a new critical appreciation. The essays that comprise the book move from personal biographical links to a feminist perspective. Here, a sense of much to come is overtly noted: “Their Eyes Were Watching God possesses a power and insight that should continue to compel, inspire, and fascinate readers of American novels” (21). The volume includes essays by Robert Hemenway, Nellie McKay, Hazel Carby, and Rachel Blau DuPlessis.

Zora in Florida [Orlando: University of Central Florida Press, 1991] is a collection of essays edited by Steve Glassman and Kathryn Lee Seidel, which focuses on “the place that gave [Hurston] her inspiration, the frontier wilderness of central Florida” (ix). While Their Eyes Were Watching God is often alluded to, most essays here respond to her nonfiction books, some short stories, and her less well-known novels.

Looking at humor in Hurston, John Lowe's Jump at the Sun: Zora Neale Hurston's Cosmic Comedy [Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1994] features a significant chapter, “Laughin' Up a World: Their Eyes Were Watching God and the (Wo)Man of Words.” Lowe sees Jonah's Gourd Vine as having been good practice ground for Hurston in her preparation to develop the powerful Janie. She learns that humor “can be constructive, supportive, and joyous, and that it can create personal and communal harmony as well as discord” (157): from this starting point Lowe launches his argument.

Deborah G. Plant's Every Tub Must Sit on Its Own Bottom: The Philosophy and Politics of Zora Neale Hurston [Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1995] attempts to reclaim Hurston's intellectual life. Plant admits to using a variety of critical approaches—“narratological, biographical, archetypal, womanist, psychoanalytic, expressive, sociological, Black aesthetic” (1). Plant reminds the reader that 1990s critics were beginning to question the “categorical and uncritical portrayal of … Their Eyes as the feminist-womanist manifesto” (169). A few of these overlooked moments in the novel that Plant alludes to include Janie's lack of female friends on the muck, male violence toward Janie from Tea Cake, the violent excessiveness of Tea Cake's demise, and Janie's aloneness in the world as the pathway to “psychospiritual freedom” (173).

Among the women of Women of the Harlem Renaissance [Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1995], Cheryl A. Wall examines most especially the movement's three central female literary artists, Jessie Fauset, Nella Larsen, and Zora Neale Hurston. The goal of the book “is to chart the journeys of the women of the Harlem Renaissance,” examining both “the journeys they traveled to create their literary texts and the journeys those texts depict” (xv). In the chapter called “Zora Neale Hurston's Traveling Blues,” Wall places Hurston in geographical locale during the writing of Their Eyes Were Watching God and matches incidents, characters, and moments in the novel with non-fictional personalities and places of Mules and Men. Wall argues that Janie's journey to spiritual wholeness “draws on hoodoo iconography as well as biblical allusion and blues stoicism” (192). Janie's search, as Hurston's search, is one of finding the language in which to contemplate the ideas. The hurricane becomes an “analogue to the initiation rituals” (193); it is only on the other side of that tempestuous rout that Janie can move from questioning God to watching God and understand the world turned upside down, understand God dwarfing the white man's hegemonic control.

Lynda Marion Hill explores Hurston's career as a dramatist and performing artist in Social Rituals and the Verbal Art of Zora Neale Hurston [Washington, D.C.: Howard University Press, 1996]. Hill connects the plays of Hurston with her interest in and deep knowledge of folklore. By extension, she draws links among moments of Hurston's life, the writing of Their Eyes Were Watching God, and her use of folklore in this novel in particular.

By the mid-nineties, scholarship on Hurston abounded. The time had come for Rose Parkman Davis to compile Zora Neale Hurston: An Annotated Bibliography and Reference Guide [Westport, Connecticut: Greenwood Press, 1997]. In a helpful compendium, she catalogs twenty-six books about Hurston, 137 dissertations that included Hurston, 170 essays and book chapters about Hurston, and another 205 periodical essays about Hurston, dating from the 1930s to 1997. Her brief paragraph commentaries are clearly articulated.

In The Assertive Woman in Zora Neale Hurston's Fiction, Folklore, and Drama [New York: Garland, 1998], Pearlie Mae Fisher-Peters examines the ways Hurston's female character “habitually uses male-female relationships in a courtship or a marriage situation to stress the importance of spoken language or folk speech in conveying one's sense of worth and self-respect” (xvi). In the concluding chapter on Janie, Peters shows how the “talk experience” is essential to shaping the total existence of an assertive woman. In short, she can become assertive only through her own talk, by using her own tongue, and that voice will always be the voice rooted, nourished, and in full bloom in the garden of folk wisdom of central Florida's African-American population.

Towards the end of the decade, another collection of essays on Hurston's work appeared. In Gloria L. Cronin's Critical Essays on Zora Neale Hurston [New York: G. K. Hall, 1998], she compiles seven responses to Hurston's Their Eyes from a historical perspective. While the first three are contemporary reviews of the novel upon its first publication in 1937, the latter essays move ahead by five decades, to the late 1980s. Cronin's span demonstrates the movement from early aspersions cast upon a black woman's love story to the later praise and celebration of a black woman's love story.

Susan Edwards Meisenhelder's Hitting a Straight Lick with a Crooked Stick: Race and Gender in the Work of Zora Neale Hurston [Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 1999] is a close textual analysis of Hurston's work. Claiming that Hurston has not been the subject of much close reading and that ungrounded generalizations can easily result, Meisenhelder explores the “complex interaction of race and gender in the lives of black people” (13). While Hurston might prefer to “specify” instead of “signify,” to lambaste rather than lampoon, the complications of a heterogeneous reading audience and the times in which she wrote, Hurston, Meisenhelder argues, was deliberate in the care with which she wrote about the inequities she saw in the dominant world. She sees Hurston's novel as both a story of traditional romance, but, perhaps more importantly, a “quest … of survival and self-affirming autonomy” (91). The narrator is Janus-faced; both readings are possible.

In Cynthia Ward's “From the Suwanee to Egypt, There's No Place Like Home.” [PMLA 115 (January 2000): 75-88], she compares Hurston's last novel Seraph on the Suwanee to Carolyn Chute's The Beans of Egypt, Maine, with particular emphasis on the exploration of class issues and connections to literacy.