Few 20th-century American novels are more widely celebrated than Zora Neale Hurston’s 1937 classic, Their Eyes Were Watching God. The work, which traces a Southern black woman’s odyssey through poverty and difficult marriages toward self-understanding, has been praised by countless scholars and writers, was adapted into a television film starring Halle Berry and produced by Oprah Winfrey and Quincy Jones, and, as of 2023, was assigned in more college courses than any other novel written by an American woman.
The book’s popularity is remarkable for two reasons. Firstly, when Hurston died in 1960, she was poor and obscure. Her reputation only began ascending in the 1970s, thanks largely to the advocacy of the novelist Alice Walker, who was a great admirer of Hurston. Hurston’s present popularity
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