Their Eyes Were Watching God embraces timely social issues of racial and gender relationships, spiritual growth, emotional independence, and sense of community.

Zora Neale Hurston, once the most famous black American woman writer and folklorist of the 1920s and 1930s, fell into obscurity by the 1950s. In the following decades the civil rights and feminist movements sparked renewed interest in black women writers, bringing back into favor this novel about an African-American woman's journey to selfdiscovery. Indeed, Janie Mae Crawford's triumph over poverty, lack of education, abusive men, and oppressive traditions foreshadows the transformation of American society as blacks and women attained more equality.

Hurston shows Janie's evolution through relationships with her grandmother, her three husbands, and her best friend, Pheoby Watson. This journey of self-actualization and sisterhood begins with her grandmother's stories of slavery—narratives that explain the fundamental psyche of why blacks accepted...