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Their Eyes Were Watching God, a luminous and haunting novel about Janie Crawford, a Southern black woman in the 1930s whose journey from a free-spirited girl to a woman of independence and substance, continues to inspire the next generation of students. Freshman Common Read: Manchester Community College --among others
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"[A] brilliant novel about a woman's search for her authentic self and for real love." - Edwidge Danticat
"Their Eyes Were Watching God belongs in the same category with [the works of] William Faulkner, F. Scott Fitzgerald, and Ernest Hemingway, that of enduring American literature." - Saturday Review
"This is a deeply soulful novel that comprehends love and cruelty, and separates the big people from the small of heart, without ever losing sympathy for those unfortunates who don't know how to live properly. Hurston is a lyrical writer, and lyricism is not usually my cup of tea, but there are talents that go beyond genre and taste. Her greatest claim over me is that she never was ashamed of the novel as a form-she believed in the transformative power of storytelling, and she took risks with sentiment that few contemporary writers are prepared to make." - America Magazine
"This is a deeply soulful novel that comprehends love and cruelty, and separates the big people from the small of heart, without ever losing sympathy for those unfortunates who don't know how to live properly. Hurston...believed in the transformative power of storytelling, and she took risks with sentiment that few contemporary writers are prepared to make." - Zadie Smith, bestselling author of White Teeth and On Beauty
"Undoubtedly one of the important American novels." - Publishers Weekly (starred review)
