Their Eyes Were Watching God: A Novel (Edition Reissue) by Hurston, Zora Neale [Paperback(2006£©]

Their Eyes Were Watching God is a 1937 novel and the best known work by African-American writer Zora Neale Hurston. The novel narrates main character Janie Crawford's "ripening from a vibrant, but voiceless, teenage girl into a woman with her finger on the trigger of her own destiny."Set in central and southern Florida in the early 20th century, the novel was initially poorly received for its rejection of racial uplift literary prescriptions. Today, it has come to be regarded as a seminal work in both African-American literature and women's literature. Time included the novel in its 2005 list of the 100 best English-language novels published since 1923. In response to the hostile portrayals of his race, W. E. B. Du Bois wrote an article for the NAACP journal. In that article, "Criteria of Negro Art",[8] in which he argued that all art is propaganda and his art would always be political.[9] He thus advocated an Uplift program to improve the image of African Americans in society. The Uplift agenda presented fine and upstanding African Americans who conformed to the social mores of the day. Pursuing this aim, the black women's club movement attempted to combat the stereotype of licentiousness for black women. Their response was a stigmatized or entirely muted presentation of black female sexuality in African-American literature and art. Hurston rejected the Racial Uplift efforts to present African Americans in a way that would accommodate the cultural standards of the white majority. Yet she also asserted her work as distinct from the work of fellow Harlem Renaissance writers she described as the "sobbing school of Negrohood" that portrayed the lives of black people as constantly miserable, downtrodden and deprived.[15] Instead, Hurston celebrated the rural, southern African-American communities as she found them. In addition, Hurston refused to censor women's sexuality, writing in beautiful innuendo to embrace the physical dimension to her main character's romances.