Their Eyes Were Watching God
Zora Neale Hurston · 1937
Published in 1937, ignored for decades, resurrected by Alice Walker in the 1970s. Hurston's vernacular prose captures Black Southern speech as a living literature. Janie Crawford's search for her own horizon, not a man's version of it, makes this a feminist epic that predates the movement by a generation.
The case against
Phonetic dialect thick on every page; you will either tune your ear or stall by chapter two. Janie supposedly tells Pheoby her story, yet the book keeps sliding into standard third person, a seam it never closes. And Tea Cake, the great love, beats Janie to display possession; the narration registers it almost fondly and moves on, which reads worse every decade.
Literary Fiction · the Pro canon
The case for it and the rest of the canon open with Pro.
if this one calls to you, so will these →
