Understanding Zora Neale Hurston’s Their Eyes Were Watching God Online: A Student Casebook to Issues, Sources, and Historical Documents

Zora Neale Hurston’s Their Eyes Were Watching God highlights the vitality of African American culture. This work demonstrates how African Americans fashioned themselves individually and collectively to combat racism, classism, and sexism. An encyclopedia of African American folk culture, it simultaneously presents historical, political, and social commentary on the relationships between men and women as well as between blacks and whites in America.
Included are interviews with people living in the South at the time of the novel’s publication, poetry, rap, folktales, sermons, original materials on ebonics, minstrel songs, the blues tradition, the novel in theatrical and dance performance, and materials on Hurstons’s hometown of Eatonville, Florida.