Many literary scholars believe that Zora Neale Hurston’s Their Eyes Were Watching God (1937) has been the primary influence on some of the most accomplished Black women writing in the United States today. Indeed, Alice Walker, the author of the prize-winning novel The Color Purple, has said of Their Eyes, “There is woman’s search for self and community, was ever relegated to the margins of the literary canon.
The details of the novel’s initial reception help answer this question. Unlike the recently rediscovered and reexamined work of Harriet Wilson, Their Eyes was not totally ignored by book reviewers upon its publication. In fact, it received a mixture of positive and negative reviews both from White book reviewers working for prominent an ordinary Black woman in a Black community, and the novel went quietly out of print.
Recent acclaim for Their Eyes results from the emergence of feminist literary criticism and the development of standards of evaluation specific to the work of Black writers; these kinds of criticism changed readers’ expectations of art and enabled them to appreciate Hurston’s novel. The emergence of feminist literary criticism was crucial because seems to concern itself with the possibilities of representation of the speaking Black voice in writing.”
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