Zora Neale Hurston, a writer and anthropologist associated with the Harlem Renaissance, published her second and most famous novel Their Eyes Were Watching God in 1937. Set in Central and South Florida, the novel follows protagonist Janie Crawford’s evolution from impressionable, idealistic girl to self-confident woman.

Famed for her work as an ethnographer and an author, Hurston chronicled contemporary issues in the Black community with honesty. While somewhat unrecognized in her time, Hurston’s writing came to prominence in the 1970s through the efforts of intellectuals like Alice Walker. Their Eyes Were Watching God, as one of the seminal texts of 20th-century African American and women’s literature, is now regarded as an American classic.

Content Warning: The novel mentions incidents of rape, forced pregnancy, and domestic abuse; describes the lives of enslaved people, racism, and colorism; and portrays mental illness. Although the novel uses the n-word as a historically accurate representation of speech, this guide does not reproduce this slur and instead obscures it in direct quotation.

Plot Summary

The novel opens with a frame narrative. Janie Crawford, the widow of Joe “Jody” Starks, the former mayor of Eatonville, comes home after running off with a younger man she married shortly after the death of her husband. Janie is shabbily dressed, so the townspeople assume that the young man took all her money and abandoned her. Eager to understand the truth and to help her friend, Pheoby Watson visits Janie, who not only tells Pheoby about what happened while Janie was away but also fills in details about her life before Eatonville.

The insert narrative begins when Janie was 16 and becoming aware of love and sexual desire. She made the mistake of kissing a boy walking down the road in front of her house. Nanny Crawford, the grandmother who had raised her since birth, worried about Janie’s sexual forwardness and forced Janie to marry Logan Killicks, a prosperous but crude farmer whose sexual failures disappointed Janie.

Intent on discovering something beyond Logan’s farm, Janie fell in love with Joe, whom she encountered heading to help build the new all-Black town of Eatonville. Joe seduced Janie with ambitious promises about Eatonville, but she soon found the town as stifling as Joe’s control of her self-expression.

Joe died of kidney failure when Janie was in her forties, leaving her independently wealthy. Rather than bowing to pressure to marry another man like Joe, Janie scandalized the town by beginning a romance with and then marrying Vergible “Tea Cake” Woods, a handsome, adventurous, yet poor man many years her junior. The couple left Eatonville and, after a brief interlude in Jacksonville that forced Janie to accept Tea Cake as the freewheeling man he was, they moved to the Everglades, where they worked as seasonal migrants and became the center of the rough society there.

Their mostly idyllic time in the Everglades came to an end when a hurricane destroyed Southern Florida. During their flight away from the storm, Tea Cake contracted rabies. Developing a mental illness from the untreated infection spreading to his brain, Tea Cake attempted to shoot Janie, who killed him in self-defense. Janie was tried for his murder and acquitted.

After hearing Janie’s story, Pheoby expresses her own desire to have more adventures and to expand her vision of what a woman can be. Once captive to Nanny’s vision of marriage and respectability, by the end of the novel, Janie has embraced a natural vision of love and found herself in the process.