Their Eyes Were Watching God was published by J.B. Lippincott Company, Philadelphia, on 18 September 1937, in a first printing of approximately 3,000 copies priced at $2.00. Hurston wrote it in seven weeks while in Haiti on a Guggenheim Fellowship, reportedly still devastated by the end of an affair with a younger man. The novel sold modestly and went out of print by the early 1940s. For three decades it was effectively lost. Then Alice Walker’s 1975 essay “In Search of Zora Neale Hurston” initiated a rediscovery that brought the novel back into print and, eventually, into the American literary canon where it now sits securely.
The Novel
Janie Crawford returns to Eatonville, Florida — the all-Black town where she grew up — after an absence of nearly two years. Her friend Pheoby Watson comes to hear her story. The novel unfolds as Janie’s narration to Pheoby, framed by this evening conversation.
Janie’s story spans three marriages. Her grandmother, a former slave, marries her off to Logan Killicks, an older farmer — security without love. Janie leaves him for Joe Starks, an ambitious, charismatic man who takes her to Eatonville and becomes the town’s mayor and biggest property owner. Joe gives Janie status and prosperity but demands her silence and submission; he makes her tie up her beautiful hair and stand behind the store counter. Their marriage curdles into two decades of mutual bitterness. After Joe dies, Janie meets Vergible “Tea Cake” Woods — younger, poorer, and alive with joy. They move to the Everglades, work the muck during bean-picking season, and love each other with an equality Janie has never known.
The novel’s climax is a hurricane on Lake Okeechobee — based on the real 1928 Okeechobee hurricane that killed over 2,500 people, most of them Black migrant workers. During the storm, Tea Cake is bitten by a rabid dog while saving Janie from drowning. He contracts rabies, goes mad, and Janie must shoot him in self-defence. She is tried for murder and acquitted by an all-white jury.
The Language
Hurston wrote the novel’s dialogue in Black Southern vernacular — not as dialect comedy but as a fully articulated literary language with its own beauty and precision. The narrative voice shifts between standard English and vernacular, a technique that mirrors Janie’s own movement between the world of speech and the world of thought. This use of language was revolutionary: no previous American novelist had treated Black Southern English as a vehicle for serious literary art without condescension.
Richard Wright attacked the novel in a 1938 review, calling it a “minstrel” performance that “carries no theme, no message, no thought.” Wright wanted protest fiction; Hurston gave him something entirely different — a novel about Black interiority, Black pleasure, Black self-determination. The debate between Wright’s and Hurston’s visions of what Black literature should be has never been resolved; it has simply expanded to accommodate both.
Collecting Their Eyes Were Watching God
First edition (1937, Lippincott): Approximately 3,000 copies, $2.00.
Identification points:
- J.B. Lippincott Company imprint
- “First Edition” stated or identifiable
- Blue cloth binding
- Dust jacket extremely rare
Approximate market values:
- Fine/Fine in dust jacket: $30,000–$100,000+
- Near Fine/Good jacket: $15,000–$40,000
- Signed first edition: essentially impossible to price (Hurston-signed copies are museum rarities)
- Without jacket: $3,000–$10,000
Value trajectory: One of the most dramatically appreciating titles in twentieth-century American literary collecting. The tiny first printing, combined with the novel’s canonical status and the near-impossibility of finding copies in jacket, makes this a trophy book. Hurston died in poverty in 1960 and was buried in an unmarked grave; the recovery of her reputation has been one of the great stories of American literary history, and the market reflects it.
The Recovery
Alice Walker found Hurston’s unmarked grave in a Fort Pierce, Florida, cemetery in 1973 and placed a headstone reading “A Genius of the South.” Walker’s subsequent essay and her editorial work on Hurston brought Their Eyes Were Watching God back into print. The novel entered university curricula in the 1980s and has never left. It is now the most widely taught novel by an African American woman and one of the most widely taught American novels, period. Oprah Winfrey produced a television adaptation in 2005 starring Halle Berry — a production that, whatever its merits, introduced the novel to millions of new readers.