During the 1930s, Lippincott was a major trade publishing house. Hurston published five titles during the decade, each of them with Lippincott. In the 7 August 1937 issue of Publisher's Weekly, a small article appeared announcing Lippincott's plans for promotion of their fall line of books, which included “generous appropriations” for advertising. Large space had already been “scheduled for the most widely-used book media.”¹ The plan included posters, post cards, and circulars. In the next issue of Publisher's Weekly on 14 August 1937, full-page ads announced some of their titles, including Harbor Nights by Harvey Klemmer, Triumphant Pilgrimage by Owen Rutter, The Far East Comes Nearer by Hessell Tiltman, Transit U.S.A. by W. L. River, and Their Eyes Were Watching God by Zora N. Hurston.

The ad for Hurston's book uses the top three-quarters of the page for the reprint of a three-paragraph review from Virginia Kirkus's Bookshop Service, worth quoting here in its entirety:

I loved Jonah's Gourd Vine: thought some of her early short stories very fine. I feel that this book measures up to the promise of her early books.

Here is an authentic picture of negroes [sic], not in relation to white people, but to each other. An aging grandmother carries [sic, marries?] off her granddaughter, almost a child, to a middle aged man for security and she leaves him when she finds that her dreams are dying, and goes off with a dapper negro [sic], full of his own sense of power and go-getter qualities.

He takes her to a mushroom town, buys a lot, puts up a store and makes the town sit up and take notice. His success goes to his head. Their life becomes a mockery of her high hopes. So after his death she goes off with a youth who brings her happiness and tragedy. A poignant story, told with rhythmic beauty.

The bottom quarter of the page contains a bold black box with white type: Their Eyes Were Watching God on two lines, followed by “A Novel by Zora N. Hurston.” Beside the box is a brief statement about Hurston's successes, including mention of her as a Guggenheim winner, and her honorable mention in the Book-of-the-Month Fellowship Award. The ad announces the publication date as 23 September.

In the same 14 August issue, Publisher's Weekly includes the title in its “PW Forecast for Buyers.” Citing a 16 September publishing date, the blurb claims: “Rates Lippincott's biggest fiction ad. budget for September. The author of Jonah's Gourd Vine and Mules and Men, who is at present studying on a Guggenheim Fellowship, has written an absorbing novel of her own people.” As was common at the time, the writer of this short description wants to make clear that Hurston's people are separate from, and not to be confused with, either people in general or this particular writer's people. The book does not appear again until it is listed as “ready” in the fall listing in the 18 September issue; then appears one final time in the 2 October listing of “This Week's New Books.” Here the comment is more reductive: “A story of a Negress, Janie and her love for Tea Cake, who was much younger than herself.”²

When Lippincott published Their Eyes Were Watching God in September 1937, the novel joined two other Hurston works published earlier by Lippincott: the May 1934 release of Jonah's Gourd Vine, her first novel, and the October 1935 release of Mules and Men, her first collection of folklore. For readers familiar with the earlier works, and for those readers who followed the creative outpourings of the black literati of the Harlem Renaissance, another offering from Hurston must have elicited some small excitement, but responses from 1937 readers can only be based in conjecture. No matter the advertising efforts on the part of Lippincott, the book went all too soon out of print.

This novel, along with all her books, was widely reviewed by both the leading white and black periodicals of the day: Booklist, New York Post, Saturday Review of Literature, Time, New York Times Book Review, New York Herald Tribune Books, New Masses, New Republic, Nation, Journal of Negro History, Journal of Negro Education, and Opportunity, to name a few. White reviewers, writing for what was considered at the time of publication to be mostly white publications, were far and away lavish in their praise of her writing. These reviewers were sensitive to the race of the writer and the race of the characters, insisting that the book was worth the time, and that even though its characters were Negro, they had issues, problems, and situations that were human in quality. No matter the praise of the white presses in the North, even in Florida, Hurston, for the most part, was not read by its white citizens. At the time, the South was busy teaching in its public schools the works of dead white men. Literarily, the living have always been less interesting than the dead.

The publication history of Their Eyes Were Watching God is a story worth knowing, as recounted by Richard Wentworth, the former director of the University of Illinois Press, in a 2000 hardcover edition of the novel by HarperCollins. University of Illinois Press got word from Michael Harper, an African-American poet the press was publishing, that a friend of his, Robert Hemenway, was at work on a “major biography of a neglected African-American writer, Zora Neale Hurston.”³ Illinois published Hemenway's biography of Hurston in 1977, and upon Hemenway's encouragement, the press secured rights to publish Their Eyes Were Watching God. Though others had published the book, insufficient sales caused them to drop the title and the rights reverted to Lippincott. The University of Illinois Press bought the rights in January 1977, and published the book in 1978, selling a “modest 7,200 copies” that first year. Illinois had the title for ten years, selling 350,000 copies, “an amazing sales track for a university press,” before selling the rights to Harper and Row in 1989.⁴ Wentworth, among others, attributes the growth of sales in Their Eyes Were Watching God to Alice Walker's essay “In Search of Zora Neale Hurston,” originally published in Ms. magazine in March 1975 and then reprinted as “Looking for Zora”—along with “Zora Neale Hurston: A Cautionary Tale and a Partisan View,” the foreword to Hemenway's biography—in Walker's 1983 collection of essays, In Search of Our Mothers' Gardens. Credit also goes to other black authors who were rediscovering Hurston, and black scholars who began teaching the book in women's studies courses in the late 1960s and early 1970s. The Modern Language Association petitioned for the reissue of the book in 1975.

Their Eyes Were Watching God and its author were lost and unknown names even in African-American literature courses for almost three decades. Then, thanks to the people listed above and word-of-mouth news, Their Eyes Were Watching God, for the first time almost a half century after its original publication date, became one of the leading titles in all of American literature. The rest of Hurston's work is steadily gaining its own readership.

Notes

1. Publisher's Weekly (7 August 1937): 387.

2. Publisher's Weekly (2 October 1937): 1458.

3. Richard Wentworth, “Note on Publication History,” in Their Eyes Were Watching God (New York: HarperCollins, 2000), p. 229.

4. Wentworth, p. 230.