In her 40s, she dated a man in his 20s whom she perceived as the great love of her life. Hurston said that the novel was inspired in part by her own complicated personal entanglements. God is the story of Janie Crawford, an independent spirit who recalls her relationships to a friend while visiting her home town. Hurston said that she felt commanded by a 'force somewhere in space,” finishing the novel in Haiti while researching another book on Caribbean culture. Her 1937 follow-up, Their Eyes Were Watching God, was written in seven weeks, an incredibly short period of time for a book. After attending Barnard College for anthropology, Hurston became steeped in the Harlem Renaissance of the 1920s and set her sights on writing, publishing several short stories and one novel by 1935.

to establish its own local government, and where her family was prominent in the community. Hurston was raised in Eatonville, Florida, one of the first all-black towns in the U.S. Take a look at some things you might not know about this seminal novel. It wasn’t until the 1970s that readers embraced God wholeheartedly, inspiring a generation of provocative artists from Maya Angelou to Beyonce. In an era when “black literature” was expected to be optimistic and uplifting, Hurston’s story of a woman sifting through the ashes of her love life was stark in its depiction of a woman’s independence and sexual freedom. Published in 1937, Zora Neale Hurston’s Their Eyes Were Watching God was not initially well-received.

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