Their Eyes Were Watching God.

Published in 1937, Zora Neale Hurston's Their Eyes Were Watching God is one of the defining novels of twentieth-century American literature and the cornerstone of the Harlem Renaissance's lasting legacy in fiction. The book traces the life of Janie Crawford, a Black woman in early twentieth-century Florida, as she moves through three marriages in search of a love and a selfhood entirely her own - first into the stifling security arranged by her grandmother, then into the prosperous but possessive household of Joe Starks, mayor of the all-Black town of Eatonville, and finally into a transformative union with the younger, freer Tea Cake, who carries her down to the muck of the Everglades and into the hurricane that gives the novel its terrible and beautiful climax. Drawing on Hurston's training as an anthropologist and her deep ear for the speech of the rural South, the novel is written in a richly cadenced vernacular that was, in its day, controversial - some of her Harlem Renaissance contemporaries objected to it - but that posterity has come to regard as one of the great achievements of American prose. Neglected for decades after Hurston's death in obscurity in 1960, the book was rediscovered in the 1970s, championed by Alice Walker, and has since taken its place among the indispensable works of the modern canon. Zadie Smith has spoken for many of its later readers in writing: "For me, Their Eyes Were Watching God is one of the very greatest American novels of the 20th century. It is so lyrical it should be sentimental; it is so passionate it should be overwrought, but it is instead a rigorous, convincing and dazzling piece of prose, as emotionally satisfying as it is impressive. There is no novel I love more."